Isn’t she beautiful? After years of k’nex, lego, and the back of the kitchen chairs, my husband and son treated me to this for my birthday. I treated myself to a ball-winder at the same time. I’ve been holding off from starting anything new until I finish something (I’d have 100 projects on the needles and nothing done, otherwise. Know thyself.) But, really, one my projects is *almost* done, so it would be irresponsible not to start a swatch, right? RIGHT? Because, you know, it’s cotton and it’ll take a while to dry for blocking…

It took me less than a minute to wind a ball of yarn. Ahhhhhhh. I’m not counting setup time because I might have been lovingly caressing the cherry wood of the swift for a while. I’m not sure; time kinda stopped.

Have a great weekend – I’ll be swatching for this.

[The swift is from Knitting Notions.]

Quite a little while ago, I entered Karrie‘s Fake Rhinebeck Contest. To my great surprise and delight, I won! The yarn lazed around my kitchen and living room for a bit, waiting for me to get my act together. Let’s not mull on how long that took. Look! Pretty yarn! Thanks, Karrie.

The yarn still hasn’t told me what it wants to be. I’m tempted to do something similar to the Red Bird Knits’ Latvian Wedding Socks pattern with it. Time shall tell.

The yarn is Syncopation self-striping sock yarn in ‘Dayspa’.

I am relatively new to stitch markers that aren’t little circles of plastic, twisters, or bits of yarn, so I was thrilled with these cute markers Karrie put in. You can’t tell in this photo, but behind the ‘knit’ and the heart both look like knitted fabric. They give me a thrill quite out of proportion to their size. Must get more stitch markers.

	Hubby’s House Socks are coming along. He decided on a Greek Key pattern for the top. I was worried about this yarn, as he asked me to duplicate my colors from the first Hogwarts Sock Swap that I did. Thank goodness I took some notes.
Even with the notes, the colors aren’t quite the same; the new yarn is a bit lighter than the first go-round. I’m not sure whether that’s a function of the base yarn I used, the fact that I dyed more at a time (though I upped the dye amount to compensate), or just the dyeing fates. At any rate, John likes it, and that’s what matters.

The hollow shell-of-a-ball of the old yarn is on the right (Fingering weight KnitPicks base) and the new yarn on the left (DK weight Louet Gems base.)

So, awhile back I built a Lego swift, and it was workable. Then, I found a box of K’nex on sale at the toy store for $10. I couldn’t resist! The result is a swift that works more smoothly than the Lego one, which creaked and groaned quite a bit. Besides, the boys started building specialized contraptions last night, and the Lego swift was cannibalized for parts. R.I.P.

Here is version one of the K’nex swift. It’s horizontal like the Lego swift, and would have worked well with a few improvements. The last arm-joins also held the yarn. In fact, they held the yarn a little too well, causing it to tangle around the joiny bits during winding. Grrrr. I wound with it once, and then let the boys tear it up to build robots.

This morning, after the unfortunate demise of the Lego swift, I once again needed to wind yarn. So, out came the one box of K’nex I own. Version two of the swift:

This worked all right, but see how loose the yarn is? That’s a tangle waiting to happen, and it did. What’s a gal to do? Why, lengthen the arms, of course. Anyone playing along at home will notice I also had to add height to allow the longer arms to swing. This took some creative joining due to my lack of K’nex. A larger selection will yield a much prettier product. Here’s what I ended up with:

This skein of Louet Gems is sitting nice and tight now. If it were a bit longer, I’d have added orange clips to slide along the end of the arms to adjust for length. As it is, my skein was sitting on the blue rods. Here’s a close-up of the arm end. The orange clips weren’t present for my skein.

Happy building! Those of you looking to build your own (you know who you are) will be happy to know that K’nex are color-coded. So, it should be easy to follow along from the photo. If you don’t have the same colors, experiment. The K’nex system is built so that parts can be swapped out (for example, two blue rods and a joiner is the same length as a red rod.)

My husband takes all of this as a sign that he needs to buy me a real swift for Christmas. Who am I to argue?

[PS - The tub o' K'nex I bought was called the "Silver Edition Value Tub".]

The reason I haven’t been talking about my knitting to y’all lately is that I’m not allowed to show it. I’m knitting like a madwoman on these Hogwarts socks, and I don’t want to ruin the surprise. By the way, I’ve come to believe that I may be the slowest knitter on the planet. I read this interview with Deb, who did the 52 pair plunge in under 6 months. She says she gets through a sock in between 5.5 and 8 hours. Wow. I bow in awe to Deb’s knitterly speed. This got me thinking, though. Is she that fast, or am I just that slow?! Regardless, I shall plod along and finish… eventually.

I think it’s safe to tell you that these socks have a teensy bit of colorwork, so I found myself dealing with a few balls of yarn at once. At first, I just stopped every row or so and untangled everything. If I waited more than two rows, it was quite a mess. Eventually, I remembered seeing a photo of a yarn bobbin somewhere online. I ran to my old cross-stitch drawer, and dug out one of those cardboard cards. Feeling quite proud of myself, I wound my bobbin and continued on.

There’s a reason that these aren’t marketed as yarn bobbins. They’re not quite strong enough, and about once every row or two, the end of the yarn would slip from the slit and the bobbin would tumble down. If I didn’t catch it quickly enough, the kitten would be happy to pounce on it for me. Multiply this by the number of bobbins, and I was getting a bit irritated by the end of sock #1. However, it was still better than untangling full balls of yarn.

Between socks, I made a trip to the LYS and looked around for bobbins. I found a plastic version of my cardboard nemesis, and was actually standing in line with it when I saw THEM. Strange, stacked transparent discs marked as bobbins. When I asked the shop owner about them, she positively glowed with praise. Now that I’ve used them, I’m glowing, too. They are wonderful. Firstly, they don’t have corners to catch on each other – when they bang together, they just slide past. They also don’t kink up your yarn. And, they pop open for easy winding.

Here’s the kicker, though… they hang beautifully. When you want a little more yarn, just give a tug and it comes right out.

*sigh* I just love me a good gadget. If you invented these, let me know. I owe you a box of chocolates.

This product is called ‘E-Z Bobs’, from Bryson Distributing in Eugene, OR. The size pictured here is ‘small’, and came 10 to a pack for $4.50 at my LYS. Totally worth it.

Surely I’m not the first mom to notice the similarity between a wizard’s wand and a nostepinne. First the legos, and now this; if I’m not careful, the boys will start hiding their toys from me.

I dyed the yarn with Wilton’s food dye; the variegated coloring is intentional. It’s destined for a swatch for my Hogwarts socks, so I can’t tell you about it here. Don’t worry, Lesley, your socks won’t be kelly green.

There’s been more interest than I anticipated in the Lego swift; to think I almost didn’t post it! A quick refresher: my simple swift looks like this:

If you’re not sure how to go about it, show the photos to your local Lego aficionado. They’ll get right on it. The beams are approximately 21.5″ (54.5 cm) from end to end. For those of you that think in Lego dots, that’s 68 dots across, or 34 per arm. The center is two platforms, with the arms coming in between them. The spinning Lego man is optional, but highly entertaining. Here’s the view between the platforms.

The arms are a balance between sturdiness and weight. I used as many of the Technic 1 x whatever blocks that I could find, both because they have the holes in them (less weight) and because I think the locking mechanism with the little post-thingys* makes for a sturdier arm. I ran out, and used regular legos for the outside of the arms. The arms do bend a bit, especially when loaded with yarn, but it still spins.

At the end of the arms, build whatever sort of mechanism you can for holding the yarn so that it neither slips down over the arm end, nor up over the top of your “clip”. My favorite piece for this resembles an airplane strut.

Here’s my most cobbled-together clip:

Just keep the weight on the opposing arms close to the same, and you’ll be fine.

The swift can easily accommodate different skein sizes… just pop off your end clips and readjust them along the arm to fit. The only time I ‘broke’ the swift is when I was pulling a smaller diameter skein of yarn onto it, trying to get it to fit the last clip adjustment I had. The offending clip went flying, but the rest of the swift held together admirably.

Now that you have your center and arms built, it’s time to figure out how to get it to rotate. There are a lot of rotating Lego pieces, but the one I tried out first worked for me. It’s another Technic piece, and looks sort of like little helicopter rotors. I put it under my larger of the rotating platform pieces, and then balanced it on a rod from the same sort of set. If you don’t have these pieces, just look for something else that rotates.

The base is a piece that holds a rod, surrounded by some blocks to encourage it to stay in place.

That’s it!

I was at the toy store this week, and found a great tub of K’Nex for half off. I feel a K’Nex swift coming on.

* see, I’m such the enthusiast, I have all the jargon down cold