My Devious Scheme, Foiled

Funny thing about kids and swifts. If they watch me crank my winder, they want a turn. They want to do it faster, make a race out of it. Competitive wool-winding. A most excellent sport.

I encourage them in this because it means I don't have to wind my own cakes. Why do the work myself when I can Tom Sawyer someone else into doing it? Heh.

I don't take the swift and winder out every time the kids are here, maybe every tenth time, so it still feels fresh to them. I can always count on them winding off a half-dozen skeins or so. I wait until they're riding the crest of their high at being together, and then I start innocently setting up the swift. La-di-da, don't mind me, just keep on playing pirates and superheroes while I turn the crank.

Works like a charm every time.

Except for yesterday.

Do you see that hank on the swift? That's 400+ yards of Araucania sock yarn with the most insidious tangle. The only way to deal with something like this is to wind the ball by hand and pass the ball over, through and around the tangles. The yarn actually changed direction several times in the middle of the skein, and each directional change created more tangles.

Takes a long time to wind a tangled skein of sock yarn by hand. The kids saw me set up the swift and start the crank, and they were just starting to tilt into "I want a turn" when we hit the first snarl. I was afraid to take the tangled skein off the swift -- who knows what kind of spaghetti glop would have resulted if I had. So they waited while I hand wound, and they fussed with the winder and argued over which skeins they would wind. (I had several hanks laid out on the table to tempt their competitive little hearts.)

Their patience and enthusiasm for cranking yarn did not outlast my tedious hand-winding. Not even the prospect of the camera to record the fastest yarn-crankers in action could prevent their loss of interest. So I wound by hand, and then I wound with the winder, while they played in the other room and assigned each other superpowers of heat and ice and wind and lightning.

If only one of them had the superpower of detangling! Ah, well. I hope their loss of interest in yarn winding isn't permanent. If there's one lesson learned out of all this, it's that I much prefer supervising their winding to winding it myself!