There is a bedroom in our house with all the stuff in it. If something doesn’t have a place to live it goes in that room, if we don’t know what to do with something it goes in there or if it is something that really should be thrown out or given away because nobody has used it for ten years but we can’t quite bear to part with it then it goes in that room. There is a big box of wool in there and no matter how tidily I put it away, it gets up and dances a jig when I am not looking and all the colours wrap themselves around each other and make a nice big nest which looks very comfy for someone but is not good for knitting from and stops the lid from shutting.

We are supposed to be getting on with decorating the house and are always saying we are going to tidy up in there so I said if someone got me a wool winder for Christmas then I would tidy up my wool. So they did. So I did. I tried out making a couple of balls with it from a couple of the least tangly bits of mess, I thought this would be really boring and I didn’t want to give myself RSI so I planned to wind a couple of balls a day until they were done. However, it is magic,

it turns this:                                                                                      into this:

(which takes up less space and you can pull the wool out of the middle when you want to use it without making a big horrible knot that collapses in on itself after you have used a third of it) and it is strangely addictive.

I re-wound the entire box in under thirty six hours and it is all beautiful and tidy. Although, I might be busy for a while longer – that was just the double knit; there is a bag of 4 ply and several ends of 400g aran balls that aren’t enough for a whole jumper and that I have a plan for which I will tell you about later…

Here is a silly thing, just for fun, if I can get it to work. Click on the picture  and give it a minute to load properly to see the silly thing.