I got a couple of neat knitting gifts for my birthday on Saturday: a ball winder and swift from my husband! The swift is so pretty, soft light coloured wood, so smooth. The winder is industrial looking but works great. I've been resisting the urge to wind up everything in site! (I did do a few balls right away)

I got a chance to do some koolaid dying yesterday so I put the swift to use making hanks. Let me tell you it is SO much easier using the swift than winding around chair legs, which is what I used to do. Way less tangles, too. And once everything dried in the morning, winding the hank into a ball using both pieces was so fast and easy!

Here is the yarn I dyed, using ice blue lemonade and changing cherry koolaid. You can see the blue in pretty hank form, and then in skein form, with a tiny ball of scrap I dyed using spiderman koolaid (thought it would be green but it was red so I dyed the scrap rather than waste it)