Individually wrapped

For Christmas this year, my parents got me a ball winder. While they may tease me about my (still fairly) new yarn obsession, they also seem quite happy to enable me (especially since they occasionally benefit).

Today I finally broke it out and used it for the first time. After scoring some yummy new yarn at Stitches West yesterday, my friend and I decided we’d team up to get it organized. I have the ball winder; she has the swift – a metal one that was her grandmother’s and which has held up admirably all these years. After church we claimed a table in the social hall (since today was to be the first after-church knitting and crocheting group gathering, even though it was only three of us to start with). She hooked up her swift, I clamped my ball winder to the table, and away we went.

Wow. I’d never seen one of these ball winders in action and I am so, so happy I have one. It creates a perfect little cylinder ‘ball’ of yarn, easy to pull from the outside or the inside. Best of all, the little cylinders are perfectly stackable, so they’re much easier to store than loose hanks of yarn.

We didn’t get through everything this afternoon, but we made a pretty impressive dent in it. When I think back to last year, spending hours winding the yarn by hand (without a swift, either) – the knots, the tangles, the swearing – I just want to grab my little ball winder and give it a great big hug. I am tempted to sit down and wind every single bit of my yarn, just so I can stack it in pretty piles on a shelf in the library instead of keeping it in a huge plastic bin, out of sight. I am dreaming of little dowels standing at attention, perfectly spaced so that little cylinders of yarn can be dropped neatly over them and they will stay in place until I finally figure out what the yarn wants to be. I am reminding myself that I was supposed to only be buying yarn when I had a definite project in mind. Heh.