I am currently in the midst of a yarn-caking drive. Every skein, no matter what kind, is gonna be wound into a center-pull cake.
Because I say so, that's why.
I prefer knitting from my own center-pull cakes to knitting from whatever configuration the yarn manufacturer uses. And, oddly enough, I enjoy playing with the stash almost as much as knitting it.
No before photos, but here are the sock yarn and the laceweight & fingering-but-not-necessarily-sock-yarn bins posing for their glamour shots after their respective winding binges were over.
Sock yarn.
Laceweight & fingering-but-not-necessarily-sock-yarn. Those are cedar balls resting atop the cakes,
all the better to repel moths*. The other bins have blocks of cedar screwed to the underside of the cover
(thanks, Smokey!) but I ran out of blocks before I ran out of bins.
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I stayed at Younger Son's apartment a couple weekends ago when I went to Yarnover (someday I will blog about Yarnover, too). He was in the midst of moving from his basement apartment to a third-floor one in the same complex**. I noticed some odd-ish decor items scattered about.
Aha, methought, blog fodder!
On the kitchen wall.
(formerly) on the bedroom wall.
On the desk.
Also on the desk.
Last, but not least, the deer skull he found in the woods back in middle school,
and which inspired the greatest Halloween costume ever in the history of Halloween costumes***.
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Observed at the home of friend. Yes, Friend is a snorter when she laughs.
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During one of the warm spells this spring -- they come and go quickly, interspersed with cold, rain, snow, and tornado warnings -- we put the top down on Smokey's convertible and took the dogs with us when we went out for lunch.
Lucy The Senior Dog enjoying the view.
Misha The Formerly Timid Dog letting her ears blow in the breeze.
* Another advantage of storing yarn in cakes rather than skeins is that it limits the surface area available to an invading moth larvae. Ask me how I know.
** When I say "apartment complex", do not picture one of those suburban ghettos with a pool and a game/party room. This is four, three-and-a-half story brick buildings built in the 1920s that share a tiny parking lot and are entirely studio and one-bedroom apartments. It is situated at the edge of downtown Minneapolis and inhabited almost entirely by singles. They have communal barbecues in the parking lot and bi-weekly movie nights and go out for brunch en masse on Saturday mornings.
Here is the view from his new living room. That tall building at the right edge is where Al and Frannie Franken live.
*** Not sure if I ever blogged this. He found a deer skeleton in the woods and brought home as many of the bones as he could. He strung several on a piece of twine as a necklace, dangled several rib bones from the top of a staff he made from a sapling, and had me make a black hooded robe like one of the ringwraithes in Lord of the Rings. (The actual movie robes each had 35 yards of material. The one I made used somewhat less.) Best costume EVAH.
