The last time I was at my parents’ house I found some yarn in my mom’s yarn closet that I thought would work for one of my Project Linus blankets. I brought it home, but it’s currently sitting in a loose hank.

This isn’t a problem for me because one of my Christmas gifts from Jay last year was a yarn ball winder.

I haven’t used it, yet, but it’s supposed to wind balls of yarn so that you can pull them from the center. If you don’t know anything about yarn, this is a big deal to some people (i.e. me!). This would be great practice for me! Except, you have to keep some tension on the yarn when you’re winding it.

I asked Gary to help me out with that, but he was busy playing with his new pet camel, Tina.

Also, he refused to put his gun down in case somebody broke in while we were winding balls of yarn. I agreed that having your gun in hand at such a time would be very efficient. So, Gary was a no-go in the help department.

Typically when winding yarn (and there isn’t a free set of arms available) people will use swifts to hold the yarn. From what I could remember they were pricey, but I looked them up. Yikes! The cheapest one I found was $50. Considering I don’t plan on using this a lot I figured there had to be a simpler design that I could ask Jay to make for me. That’s when I came across this picture:

It was perfect! It would do the job that I needed and yet was simple enough that Jay could quickly throw it together. I printed the picture and waited for Jay to get home.

When I showed him the picture he said it wouldn’t be a problem. The biggest problem for him is remembering that it’s called a ‘swift’. To keep things somewhat simple I just refer to it as my ‘yarn spinner’ now.

Jay had it made and assembled in about a day. I took it outside to sand it (it was a gorgeous day!), so this is what it looked like sitting on my patio table. I haven’t used it, yet, but I definitely will. I just love that I can hand a picture to Jay, give him the basics of how it should work, and then within a short amount of time I actually have it in my possession. You can’t get any better than that!