Usually when my family asks me if there's anything I'd like for a birthday or Christmas gift, it takes me a while to come up with something. But this year, I was prepared! On the knitting front, I knew I could really use a ball winder and a yarn swift. You should see the contortions I put myself into to hold the yarn on my legs or feet while I wind it into a ball, and although I could occasionally talk my husband into holding it if I was winding while he was home...well, it's not his favorite way to spend an hour.
My mom must have gotten caught up in some web sites with expensive swifts because in the end, my parents gave me a check towards a swift. I was lucky enough to have just gotten a 20% off (to use in my birthday month!) coupon from The Fiber Universe, one of my local yarn shops, and I knew they sold Knit Picks swifts. I had read quite a few reviews of the swifts on Ravelry boards and the consensus seemed to be that they may not hold up forever, but that Knit Picks does have great customer service and will replace the swift if it breaks. That's good enough for me, so not only was I able to get the swift with the money my parents gave me, I had enough left over for a skein of this gorgeous blue Three Irish Girls yarn as well. (I didn't want that skein to be lonely, so I got two more, which should be enough for a sweater for me since they include so much yardage in one of these skeins. They're labeled as containing 430 yards, but they weigh about 30% more than the label says, so I think the yardage is more like 550 yards.)
I actually picked up two more skeins of yarn in a different colorway for the shrug I'm currently working on, but it's in the basement right now blocking, so that's a post for another day. I'm hoping that by turning a fan on it for a few hours, I can get it dry enough to start knitting on the border tonight....that's if it dries to be the size I'm expecting....otherwise, I may have just knitted a really, really big gauge swatch!
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