This post is dedicated to my two favorite simple machine based tools ever.

(Well, they are both based on the wheel-and-axle principle, at least. And they also both have a screw in the clamp that holds them onto the tabletop or whatever, but the screw isn't such an integral part of the mechanism.)

The umbrella swift:



And the ball winder:



There is something simple and pleasing about winding off skeins of yarn using these tools. The pleasure I feel is kind of similar to the pleasure of using other simple, time-honored tools - tools I know my great-grandmother (or even great-great grandmother) would recognize.

The swift I have makes a soft rackety-rack sound as it turns. The ballwinder makes pleasing "cakes" of yarn - the strands overlap in a complex pattern that reminds me a bit of the phyllotaxis seen in sunflower seed heads.

There's also the pleasure of expectation while doing it - winding off yarn is a preparatory step to knitting. (Sometimes, it's the most pleasant preparatory step - next, you have to make your swatch and find the right needle size and maybe figure out the pattern stitch or read through the pattern to make sure it all makes sense). But winding yarn is simple and pleasing and elemental and next to actually knitting, probably the most pleasant part of the process. It carries with it the happy expectation of starting a new project.

You can make do without them - there's the time-honored tradition of getting your "beau" (or later, your husband, or, I suppose, a particularly calm and compliant child) to agree to be manacled with wool for the length of time it takes to wind off a ball. Or, absent a beau, you can drape it around your own knees (and if you are athletic, stick your feet up in the air as you wind...there's a picture in Tracy Ullman's knitting book of her doing just that. I'm afraid my hamstrings would seize.) Or you can drape the hank over a (loosened) lampshade and wind from there.

And a ballwinder isn't totally necessary - in fact, for several years, I had a swift but no ballwinder. The only problems with handwinding balls of yarn (unless you have a nostepinne), is that you have to be very careful not to wind too tightly (which I tended to do), because it puts stress on the yarn (in fact, some "experts" advised to only wind balls right before you were ready to knit with them). The other problem is that I find the balled-up yarn goes rolling across the floor, and winds up in inaccessible places, and (if you're like me and would rather knit than sweep) picks up dust birds as well.

(There are also electrical ball winders but I have to admit I prefer the little hand-cranked one I have - too many gears and motors on things and there are more things that can go wrong. And I understand how the hand-cranked ball winder works, whereas some of the workings of even a simple motor are more mysterious. And the electric ones are, well, electric, and they SOUND electric. Instead of the little soft clatter, there is a mechanical whir, which I find less pleasing).

I like my little ball winder for those reasons - the nice, compact, pleasing-to-the-eye cakes of yarn. The fact that the "cake" stays put when you're knitting from it. (You can either do it as a center-pull, or knit from the outside. I tend to do center-pull with some yarns, and knit-from-the-outside on those that are grabbier and would give what one knitter calls "yarn barf" - where you get a big clump of yarn coming out of the middle all together). I also like that I can tuck the tag or band into the middle of the cake and keep the information with the yarn if I want to.

When I first got back into knitting, I didn't own either. It's a lot harder working with hanked yarn if you don't have a swift...I had one unhappy misadventure with a ball of Koigu that I tried to wind off by "pooling" on the floor, and then walking around and around as I wound the ball...it wound up in a big mess and I had to take hours untangling it. The swift is such a better way of doing it.

I think I also like them because they are "good" tools. They do their job well. There is nothing jury-rigged (and yes, I maintain that "jury rigged" is the right term and not "jerry rigged," which sounds like a WWI-era insult) about them - they do their job right, they do what you expect them to do. There are few things that can go wrong with them and most of those things can be easily fixed. Yes, they are single-use tools (I know some people who refuse to have single-purpose tools in their kitchens...) but I tend to feel I'd rather have a tool that does one job really well than a tool that does five jobs poorly.

So I'm very happy to have both the swift and the ball winder. Winding off yarn feels like kind of an autumnal activity, like something you do in preparation for the long winter ahead. I've been winding the skeins of Araucania into cakes in preparation for starting the Cobblestone Pullover. Even though I probably have at least a week's knitting left on the SitCom Chic I'm working on, I felt like winding yarn this afternoon.