The Yarn Whisperer

Lots of people will buy the yarn winders that they sell on Ebay - they even have electric ones as well as "old fashioned" ones. They range in price (currently) from about $2.76 (American - that one is coming from the UK so the postage might be a bit much) to about $150, with most prices currently in the $30 range.

Herschners (as well as other needlework shops) sells them
http://herrschners.com/products/product.aspx?sku=011600

I was lucky because my brother picked up for me at a thrift shop. I've never used it yet. I keep saying "oh, next time I'll use it" but I don't. But my favorite yarn winder, the one that I could count on making sure the yarn was wound with just enough tension, was my dad.

Apparrently, my dad did not always live with his mom, but with friends/relatives of his mom. One couple he stayed with I only know as Aunt Lil and Uncle Herb. I never met them and I have no idea if they were related by blood to my father or that was just what he was taught to call them.

Aunt Lil must have done a lot of needlework. She taught my dad how to wind a ball of yarn _perfectly_. No knots, no frays, no tangles. He also enjoyed winding embroidery floss so it could be easily used. His goal was always to wind the yarn with no knots - that was a point of pride with him. He'd tease out the yarn slowly and methodically. If it wouldn't unravel from one end, he'd start at the other. He said it relaxed him to wind yarn.

Of course, I loved it. "Back in the day" there weren't too many pull skeins of yarn. Whoever came up with that great idea was, well, brillant. So before I would start a project, Dad would wind the yarn for me. He'd drink his coffee and I'd drink my tea and we would talk about anything and everything under the sun. I never realized how much we communicated over that simple act. We'd talk about anything from what the yarn was going to be used for to the feasibility of life on other planets. Sometimes he seemed disappointed if I bought the pull skeins. I was a_spoiled_brat_.

I thought of this recently when I came across some yarn that needed to be wound. It would need to be placed over a chair and carefully wound. My sons wind the yarn too tight. My hubby has _way_ too much to do. And my dad has been gone for over 24 years. (No, the yarn hasn't waited _that_ long to be wound;)) I'll get around to winding one day, when I'm tired and I want to do "something" but feel too tired to work on or begin a project. And when I do, I'll drink tea and think of those evenings spent with my dad. And that will relax me.


And by the way, no kickbacks from any of these folks to me.....