A few weeks ago I had a lovely chat with TBD’s Arts and Entertainment editor, Andrew Beaujon. He interviewed me about art,fiber,Walmart,and the punkrock nature of crafting communities. He talked to a bunch of other cool people and then he posted a short piece based on those interviews last week, so here’s a link to “the year in yarn.”
Thanks, Andrew!
Old Town Alexandria is full of landmarks. One of these is a life-sized fiberglass horse that proudly stands in the bed of a classic pickup truck on King Street in front of the Hard Times Cafe.
Last night we were driving home and we noticed the horse was sporting what looked like knitted clothing. We suspected he’d been yarn bombed, but it was too damned hot to get out of the car to investigate further, the DC area currently being hotter than the surface of the sun and all. I did snap a picture out the car window to post on facebook for the amusement of my knitting friends.
This evening I was at the store chatting with Danielle when another customer sent her a message that the horse at Hard Times was sporting some mighty swanky knitwear. We grabbed a camera and took a stroll to see for ourselves. Danielle posted about what we found, complete with much better pictures than I took last night.
Recently, I acquired an object. An almighty and all-powerful object.
I didn’t set out to acquire an object of such importance, I just wanted a swift to hold my yarn while I wind it up into a ball so I can knit it into cozy things. Although there are many models, this was the model that was available at Fibre Space, my excellent local yarn store, on the day I decided it was time to get a swift.
A swift expands and collapses like an umbrella (hence the term “umbrella swift”). This makes it adjustable because hanks/skeins/clumps/blobs of yarn come in all different sizes, and you can only ask Husband to sit around holding out his arms while you wind yarn up so many times before things start to get a little tense. Or so I’m told.
You clamp the swift to the side of the table to hold it in place. Then you can take yarn and transform it from something like this:
to something like this:
That was obviously not a before and after of the same yarn. That really would be a magical machine.
This is what it looks like when in use (the swift is on the left in the image, the winder is on the right):
Husband and I find never-ending humor in the almighty and all-powerful reeling machine and mention it in conversation whenever we can.
