Delighting in Simple Mechanical Ingenuity
There are a few simple bits of machinery around my house which I delight in. It’s not merely they speed things up. It’s that they embody clever solutions, solutions in motion which are fun to watch. One is my apple peeler which peels, cores, and slices an apple that I have stuck on a set of small spikes. I brought this to work once, showed it in action, and people demanded “Do it again!”
My newest favorite is a pair of tools to help me with my foray into crochet and knitting: the yarn swift and yarn baller. Like all clever gizmos, it spares me tedious time and effort, in this case that of winding a skein of yarn into a ball. But it is also fun to watch them both at work, so much so that my husband has made a point of coming and watching them do their work. Oooo! We both say. There is something satisfying as well as pleasurable about watching human ingenuity craft an effective solution to a tedious task.
If you are taking up crochet or knitting seriously, or yarn dyeing, these are the tools you will want to have. There are more complicated swifts, but this is wonderfully simple.
The swift is from Stanwood Needlecraft: http://stanwoodneedlecraft.com/
And the yarn baller from Knitpicks.com https://www.knitpicks.com/accessories/Yarn_Ball_Winder__D82500.html