Ball Winders

For a Friday, this has been an unusually productive day. For the past few days I've been sick, so the slightest activity results in total exhaustion; that limits my activities to reading trashy library books, watching PBS (okay.. I gave in and watched Dateline tonight just out of morbid curiosity), and sleeping, with breaks for personal hygiene and eating. And knitting, of course. Fortunately, I can lie under piles of blankets and watch television while I'm knitting -- or is that the other way around? -- and having a banana and some root beer.
I made the supreme sacrifice this afternoon and hauled myself to the post office. It's cold and rainy, so I don't at all feel like going out more than necessary, especially since the last time I went out and did a lot of stuff, I got sicker and had to spend the next day in bed... resting!
So, today, between naps, I went to collect all the mail that accumulates over a whole day and a half, most of it junk, of course. Can you imagine how much junk there is? It's disgusting. The good news is that I finally got my order from KnitPicks, for which I've been waiting with baited breath: mom's blue yarn, my ball winder (yay!), and some circular needles so I can start knitting those bags.
Ball winders are such lovely little inventions! They clamp onto most table edges and have a sturdy metal yarn guide to help keep the tension of whatever you're winding. Of course I just had to try it out, so I unwound the two skeins of Demeter and wound them back into cute, squat, plump little cakes of yarn, with pauses between rounds because of the occasional tangle. Now the only problem is storage.
I've got my 50 gal. tub of acrylic yarn that I'm slowly working through, and that's still mostly full -- and of course the other tub full of wool yarn and lavender scented mothballs. Mom hinted that I might offer the acrylic yarn to the people who are invited for the knitting/crafty get-together on Sunday with the suggestion that, while it's useful for quite a few things, the hospitals in the area, as well as some charitable organiations, take donations of hats for preemies, chemo patients, and burn victims. Since babies -- and preemies, especially! -- are so sensitive to any potential irritants, it's a better idea to make them things from acrylic or cotton, at least until they're a year old or so. Doesn't have to be anything fancy, but as long as it covers their heads; the hospitals would probably be thrilled to have them.
The other thing I did -- finally -- was to actually knit myself something using my own yarn. It's gratifying to finish a project, any project, but the feeling is somehow magnified by the knowledge that you've done it all yourself from beginning to end. Of course, I don't keep sheep, but spinning, dyeing, knitting, and felting was all me. I used the leftover Sea Foam yarn and plied it with a single of the blue corriedale; the problem was that there wasn't a whole lot of it because I'd used almost all the Sea Foam to make Demeter. I tried a scarf... nope, not enough. Unraveled it and started wristlets.. nope, not enough for tht, either. Too nice to use for a hotpad... a little bag, maybe? Yup. Just enough to make a small, square pouch with a little trapezoidal flap, with about 18 inches of yarn left over at the end. Picture of little bag forthcoming, but here are gratuitous pictures of penii to annoy the censors...