Wednesday, September 12, 2007

Hmmm, I'm thinking about this

Cia from Knitting Help suggested this sock for the blue and green one:
It's from Knitty. It does look a lot like waves and the colors are very similar to what my yarn looks like. Although I'd still like something that is sort of "wavy" at the top rather than the typical ribbing.

In other knitting news, I was too anxious to get the blue/green yarn balled last night. I was going to go to my mother's house and use her spiffy ball winder, but it is still in her attic and it is still too hot to go into the attic to retrieve anything. I've been looking lately at Nostepinnes which look like:


I've been looking at increasing my medieval collection of "women's tools" and have (well had, it got sat on and broke) a drop spindle. And then found out about both niddy noddies and nostepinnes. However, despite seeing them online and knowing the theory I still didn't have one! BUT I did notice that the end of my plastic recorder had the same shape as the nostepinnes if I took the bell section off the bottom! So I thought I'd give it a try.

This is where having children comes in handy. Forced labor. I made Boo hold my yarn for me (lacking also a swift) and started wrapping the yarn. To use a nostepinnes you secure one end at the base and then wrap towards the middle (this will allow you to have a center pull ball, if that isn't important you can just start wrapping in the middle). You wrap in a diagonal direction towards you all the while turning the nostepinnes (or in this case the recorder) away from you. It took a bit of coordination to get it right, but I finally got the hang of it. It took around 40 minutes to wrap a 440 yard skein, but I think I could get faster as time goes on as there is a fair amount of coordination that needs to be learned as with any new task. After the yarn is wrapped you simply slide the ball off the end of the nostepinnes/recorder and use it. The center where the nostepinnes was sort of closes up a bit, but loose enough to be able to get your center pull going well.

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