Tools of the Trade, Part 1, Sort of

Mom slept late, so this morning I set about photographing the tools I use. I actually set up a staging area outside for the wheels, because there wasn't enough light and space in the house for it.

Then I got sidetracked by the dogs. We romped in the snow awhile, and I caught this one of Simba.

Goofy girl.

Then I cleared off the work table in the room I euphemistically call my studio, and snapped some photos of the smaller tools.

As I took photos of the swift,

and ballwinder,

I remembered where they came from. And decided to tell the story first. (Plus, I realized that to explain the swift and ballwinder, I actually need to have some yarn on there for it to make sense.)

Many years ago, my dad purchased a used knitting machine at an auction. He was the kind of man who could look at something and figure out how it worked. If there was a defect, he could either fix it, or figure out a workaround. So once he fixed it, he spent hours knitting with this knitting machine. When he died in 1996, there was a partially knit sweater on it that he was working on for one of his grandchildren. My sister took the machine, thinking that she would finish it.

The machine sat in her house for many years, she never did anything with it. When she was cleaning out her house in preparation for a move in 2003 or 2004?, she found the machine and gave it to me, thinking I might have a use for it. It was summer, I was busy outside, so I stuck it in the "fiber room" and promptly forgot about it.

One day, probably a year later, I got around to looking at the machine and the box of accessories that came with it. You guessed it, the swift and the ballwinder were in the box. Two tools that I hadn't yet purchased, but had been thinking about doing so.

It tickles me to no end to use these tools, this previously unknown connection to my Dad from so many years before.