Tante Has a New Toy

In many ways life was easy in Jerusalem. Especially when it came to knitting. I found the one store to be my LYS. It consisted on one very nice, very interested male owner, a couple of young, helpful female employees and then there was Debbie. An American ex-pat, like myself, Debbie was knowledgeable, helpful and fun to talk to. I learned quite a bit from her. Most of "the good stuff" was coming over from Germany and the two companies I used the most were Gedifra and my magical Lanas Stop. And everything came in nice center pull balls. The first time I saw a hank was at that winter meet-up I recently mentioned. (BTW, the BEST part of that evening was meeting the other knitters. They did not disappoint and even felt I made a couple of knitterly friends (Hi Orli and Ayelet!) And it was that night I bought my first hank, of Art Yarns' Silk Rhapsody if you remember, and wound it by hand. I had nightmares for days afterwards.

Flash forward seven months and see me on my first yarn crawl. ArtFibers sells by the cone and wonderful Susie at Noe Knits wound up my purchases for me. I didn't really pay much attention to the process but marveled at those little cakes. Now I am in the heart of suburbia. My purchases are done exclusively on line since the closest LYS (in Montclair, which I hear is quite nice, actually,) is just too far to get to. Oh, it may be just over 15 minutes by car but by public transportation, well according to NJ transit, with all the transferring I was to do it was going to pass the hour mark. Crazy. So these hanks are showing up and I've still been winding by hand. I hank of Cascade 220 isn't so bad, but the sock yarn. Crazier.

So I did it. I did it. I finally bought myself a ball winder!!!!!


And I took all those hand wound balls, and plopped the end into the notches on my ball winder and started to wind away.


All in the name of practice, of course, I spent my time rewinding them into soft, squishy cakes. And then I moved on to some of those direct from the manufacturer pull center balls...


because I had to. It was force from within. And I needed the yarn for the second half of Shag.


But something is still missing, of course. Worry not, my belated Chanukah present from New Roommate has been ordered and I hope is on it's way. Tante's getting a swift!

And when I do, this baby is going to go 'round and 'round into a nice squishy cake so I can cast on for a pair of Rock and Weave socks.