Yarn swift

I’m sure most of you reading this blog will be asking yourselves, “what is a yarn swift?” Well, if you know someone who knits, it’s a really handy tool to wind yarn.

I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to shoot a video of this because it is a project that appeals to a very specialized audience. After listening to feedback on Twitter and Facebook, I realized that quite a few people knew about yarn swifts.

A few months ago my wife asked me to make a yarn swift. I looked online and discovered plenty of designs; some I liked, and some I didn’t. Kathy didn’t want it to take up a lot of space; it’s not something she uses every day, and by its nature a yarn swift has a fairly large footprint. So I got to work figuring out ways I could make it both functional and collapsible.

This project was as an exercise in problem solving. One morning I spent over an hour at the hardware store just looking at all sorts of parts, gizmos and gadgets trying to figure out an efficient method to get something to spin on an axis and yet have a hole through that axis that would allow for a tightening mechanism. As always, the solution was simple.

The answer lay in the plumbing department.