Feisty Ingenuity

Habu creates  beautiful fibers with silk, wool, copper, stainless steel, linen, paper, and cotton that are incredibly interesting in their texture and drape when knitted.  

I have to admit, I was a little late to the Habu train, but I am now fully on board.

Flush with my Insouciant success in Plymouth's Grass, I decided I would actually cast on for another in the Habu Tsumugi silk 2-ply lace called for in the pattern.  A sweater in lace weight?  Well, it is actually two strands of lace weight silk that knits to a light worsted weight fabric on size US 8 needles.

For my size, I needed 5 cones of the Tsumugi.  

No problem, all I needed to do was wind one of the cones into a center pull ball, weight it, then divide it into two equal center pull balls, right?

From there, I could either knit directly from two cones at a time or wind all of the cones into balls.

Well, winding into the first ball from the cone was not much of an issue, but pulling yarn out of the center pull ball to divide it in half was rather nightmarish with frequent knots and much hair-pulling and gnashing of the teeth.

Somewhere, in the back of my mind, I remember reading, it may have been in Amy Singer's book:  No Sheep for You, that natural, non-wool, fibers should be used from the outside of the ball to prevent knots and tangles.

The yarn was beautiful and begging to be knit up, so I did not allow despair to completely overtake me.

Then, I put my thinking hat on, figuratively, of course.  I decided I needed something to stabilize the cones as I knit from them that would also allow me to knit comfortably from the outside of the two smaller balls I had divided from the single, odd-man, cone.

A thought formulated, but I needed a few supplies and a little help from a loving soul.

An order from The Websters (of yarn, if you must know) provided a smallish box.  

The former man room had a Roman shade made of camouflage fabric which had a nice, hefty dowel tucked into the bottom of it.

And, I had a husband with power tools, although the manual kind would have worked just as well!

As luck would have it, the dowel fit perfectly through the cones!

Moreover, the husband's face lit up when I approached him with a big grin and announced:  "Break out your drill, Honey, I need it!"

In no time, he cut the dowel into equal parts and drilled holes into my little box.  I left the ear flaps folded over and had him drill through those to give it a little extra support.

My handsome man got a little fancy on me and bought wooden knobs to grace the ends of the dowels to keep them from falling out of the box.

With that, allow me to present the perfect accessory when knitting with cones:

Yes, it definitely rocks my world!

AND, the husband got to use power tools.

All is well.