Knitting, the Yarn Swift and the Ball Winder

With the quickly changing season, I have become completely engrossed in my knitting. I am making, for the first time, a throw blanket. All in one piece, I'm making it on an 80cm round needle to hold all 137 stitches. You can see how my hands have been quite tied up! If found the pattern on Knitty (website here, pattern here). I think it might turn out to be the biggest thing I've ever made and I'm getting a callous on my pointer finger on my right hand to show it. I'm about 2/3rds done. Of course, mine does not look anything like the picture because I'm using up a few different balls of colour and I haven't blocked it yet. Blocking is when you wet a finished knit, stretch it and pin it down till it dries to the exact shape/size you wanted. But I suspect I will run into trouble there because of my strange left-handed (despite being right-handed) knitting.

In other exciting news, my weekly knitting group has started. We had a pretty fun time last week with a swift (the thing that resembles a miniature clothes drying rack) and a ball winder (that looks like a defunct blow dryer). Both parts are used to turn a newly bought hank (twisted yarn) into a ball. I learned a great deal in the last five minutes in trying to write that last sentence. I also came across some rather nice pictures of swifts, seen below.

Of course, the reason you use the swift with the hanks (and not balls or skeins) is because the hanks untwist in a large circle that fits just right around the swift, and this spins around to feed into either a manually made ball or the ball winder. But it's not a big deal to feed a skein or a ball of yarn directly into the ball winder to make a lovely ball of yarn that is not too tight and allows one to grab yarn either from the center or from the outside (e.g. when doubling the yarn to make it a thicker gauge).

The Ball winder looks a bit like this, where yarn is fed through the little metal extension to the left onto the spindle. Then you manually crank it. It was declared by some that this would be a wondrous lifetime career while others noted the boredom that would quickly ensue...

And voilà!