What my Honey Made Me

Niddy-noddy, niddy-noddy,

two heads and one body.

So can you guess what this is? Yes, it's a niddy-noddy. Can you guess what it's for? Maybe this will help:

You wrap yarn around niddy-noddies to make a neat skein with consistently sized wraps. This one makes a 2 meter loop. So when I finish wrapping the yarn onto a skein I can count the wraps and then approximate the length of yarn that I have. Pretty ingenious, eh?

As soon as I read of it, and saw how easy it is to make, I had to have one! Especially for all the sweaters I just salvaged from Goodwill. I sent an email to my honey and that night I had one waiting for me when I got home. Sometimes I just feel spoiled.

I already had all this wool:

from this sweater  which looks like this  close up.

Wrapping onto the niddy-noddy sure beats wrapping it onto my footstool as I had been doing.

It also will make it easier to reuse or sell the yarn as I'll know my total yardage. In this case, since I already had this stuff wrapped into skeins, I just wound one of them onto the niddy-noddy so I could count the wraps, then weighed it, and then estimated the length of the rest of the skeins from that.

When I weighed all the skeins and estimated the lengths, I had a total of 357 grams / 587 meters. Not bad. It won't make another sweater, but it's a substantial amount.

From the vest in the previous post, I got 121 grams / 543 meters. I'm still hoping to make socks out of it, but they might be short socks! Here are the two skeins (one from the back, one from the front.

I haven't washed or treated these skeins. You can see how the one I wrapped over the footstool is still very kinked from being knitted. The other skein was wrapped around the niddy-noddy (a little tighter) and tightly twisted into a skein. I think if I unwrapped it, it would still be kinky, but not like the other one.

And speaking of socks, I ordered the Harmony knitting needles I've been wanting for a while now. Troy told me to quit wishing and start clicking. (I ordered online.) I really like working with double pointed needles, and with wooden needles, and these are really beautiful, and supposed to be stronger than bamboo.  I can't wait. I went ahead and got the whole sock set which, I think, is 6 sizes (6 6-inch needles of each size). Woo hoo!