Life at campchaos has been spinning quickly and the last few weekends have been full of cool nights in the tent, duck tours with Elvis, puppy adventures, a weekend upta camp and the parking lot that is I-95 Southbound on a summer Sunday. We've managed to stay in place for a weekend and I was finally able to tackle some yarn that's needed to be wound. Dave helped me out on Friday night and held the skein and suffered through 400 yards of sock yarn. He was a good sport but I could tell that he'd rather be petting the pups instead of watching yarn slowly spin.
The next night I searched for alternatives to aid in the project and found this site, which used old school Tinker Toys to make a DIY Yarn Swift. I hadn't been a huge tinker toy fan as a kid but my sister loves them. It just so happened that Dave had a box of tinker toys from 1983 laying around so he blew off decades of attic dust and quickly went into construction mode.
We referenced the how to but also modified the design here and there. Dave even had a little Tinker Toy Guy that became the center piece of the swift.
We started out with a small base and tested a good size skein of yarn.
The moment of truth... would I end up with a ball or a tangled mess?
Between my hand crank ball winder and the tinker toy swift we made short work and I was quickly able to wind a half dozen cakes of yarn before taking the swift apart and stashing it in my knitting bag... for you non-knitters out there- a normal knitting swift is a really cool umbrella like contraption that retails at least $65. That's a lot of yarn back in this knitter's budget, plus the tinker toys break down for easy storage. Now I can get back to my knitting...
Here's the swift in action after a couple of design modifications.
1 comment:
Love the ingenuity! Nice camera work Dave.
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