- drying yarn off in a hurry - taking the ties out and spreading the skein a bit on the swift is really good, particularly if you can do this while clamping the swift to a table/chair/fence/whatever in the garden when it's sunny (for UK residents: no, not this summer. Obviously. This summer, recipe for a mouldy swift and wet yarn...)
- measuring yarn (measure half-circumference of skein and double, place on swift, mark one leg of swift with something garish, wind slowly into a ball while counting rotations like mad)
- drying light clothing... I don't have space for a clothes' horse, but when the rain comes down, I can put a blouse on the swift and it might dry quicker...
- amusing small children (this is a ballwinder-and-swift-combo - they love winding the handle on the ballwinder and seeing what happens to the swift...)
- amusing teenagers (no, really. Particularly male teenagers. They love the process of yarn-winding. I have no idea why, but a couple of years ago at Textiles in Focus at Cottenham the male teenagers working car-park duty used to bring their friends in to watch the swift work... It can't be the appeal of machines per se or they'd have been clustered round the sewing machines. The girls (other than the knitters, who saw the point) weren't that impressed; but then most teenage girls are Officially Not Impressed with Anything.)
- amusing cats (cats are best for the amusement thing - their heads look as if they're going to fall off while they're watching, but for some reason they don't have the instincts small children and teenagers have to put their front paws into the moving machinery. I would say this makes them of superior intelligence, but my current cat would live on a diet of Sellotape, elastic bands and bubblewrap if I let her... It is good to live with another stationery fetishist though...)
However.
I have been doing lots of sorting out and tidying up over the last few weeks. I started so that I could physically fit 7 people, including myself, into the lower floor of my small house for a dyeing workshop without anyone having to stand or work outside (because, as everyone in the UK knows, doing either activity outside this summer means you will inevitably become extremely wet; and so it was on that particular day), and I just seemed to keep going...
Anyway; all the way through this process I've thought 'when I feel pleased with the downstairs I'll spin that really beautiful skein of fibre I bought from Fyberspates at Ally Pally last year'. And so it came to be that having reached a state this afternoon where I wasn't anxious about tidying up anything I could see at the time, I reached for the skein, dragged out my Louet S-10... and...
... at some point in the whole tidying-up thing, I think I must have dropped something on the wheel. That's my only explanation for the thing that we very-nearly-non-spinners call that bit of the flyer with the hooks on it being... loose. And, on closer examination, cracked, both sides of the circular plastic pin with the orifice (stop sniggering, you at the back) at the other end...
So I used needlework tools... one 12mm needle to prise the cracks more open still; some wood glue bought to glue ends back onto bamboo needles, a needle to push the wood glue into the cracks... and then I realised I needed a G-clamp. So, like a fool, I went off into my completely disorganised shed, in near darkness, to look for one. After a couple of minutes of ferreting around, sanity reasserted itself, and I suddenly realised that I had a perfectly good one sitting in the dining room, and it was called my swift... So I present you... Eduarda Hook-Arms...
So, by my accounting, that's non-yarn-winding use 7). Use 8), I think, is as an artists' model for zombie artists...
Which in turn reminds me of this, which made me laugh a lot when it came out.
Yes, I am still mainlining paracetamol and ibuprofen and blowing my nose every 10 minutes - why would you ask?
Hypoteneuse and medals tomorrow...
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