This and That

When I began knitting, my mom was kind enough to give me a swift and a ball winder, and I have made great use of them over the years. They were wonderful, functional, Japanese plastic devices that worked very well.  Then, a couple of years ago the swift broke — goodness knows how, I think a cat was involved somehow, and I needed another.  I was given this nice wooden swift and the lovely wooden ball winder shown next to it.

These are beautiful devices.  However they have one problem.  The swift does not fit on my sewing table or any of the counters in the house.  You see, the part that is supposed to clamp to the table top is about 1/4 inch to short to fit around my counter edges or table top edges.  The old swift was made with a clamp much like the ones shown on the ball winder and it could fit anywhere, but the new swift has this lovely wooden clamp that is just a smidge to small, and it fits nowhere except on the room divider between the entry hall and the dining room.

I set it up some weeks ago to wind the linen, and as I intended to wind more yarn, I never took it down.  Now I am wondering if it can just become a permanent or at least moderately permanent part of our decor — I might be convinced to take it down for parties for example if I could just leave it up for every day.   I would be more than willing to compromise — for example I could stop complaining about the pile of sunglasses and other things that are stored on the kitchen counter near the coffee pot — in exchange for permanent swift mounting.

So far most visitors to the house have no idea what it is anyway and this leads to some interesting conversations.  People come up with the most outlandish ideas.

The two missing blue yarns arrived for the Anny Blatt sweater.  Now I just need to finish something so I can move on to this project.  Something else arrived in that box as well.  You would be completely naive if you think I can call a yarn store and only request two missing skeins of yarn without ordering something else — it would hardly be worth the postage after all.  But you will just have to wait to see what that something might be.  I WILL get to it this summer, even if some other project gets bumped further down the list.  Life is a constantly rejiggering of lists after all.

And I am knitting on the linen tanks.  I am about 5 1/2 inches above the armhole shaping and making good progress.  After a period of just not wanting to pick up the needles I have returned to a more productive frame of mind and I just can’t wait to sit and knit in the evening.  May this bit of knitting fever continue.