Purely Whimsical

The headache has threatened to come back, but so far it’s stayed away after lots of water and tylenol

The other day I was wandering ravelry.com and on the front page is a link to the “Bobby awards” which is something to celebrate the members of ravelry.

There are different awards, some of them uninteresting to me. Such as Raveler Who Changes Their Ravatar the Most or Most Likely Was The Class Clown. The one that I did like was Funniest Single Post.

There are some good ones in here, such as:

• Link to post
  My brother-in-law’s wife is kind of a ditz. One day he and his son were at our house having coffee and I had a skein of yarn on a metal/plastic swift at the table, which I was winding into a ball.

  She walked into the kitchen, saw the swift, and without even thinking–but dead serious, I swear–said brightly, “Oh, are you knitting an umbrella?”

  For you non-knitters, here’s a picture of a swift.

• Link to post
  Me: If you don’t get that project finished I will hide your tools so you can’t start “another” DIY project.

  Him: You do that and I will go into your stash and switch all those little tags sticking out of the balls.

For some reason, this makes me think of a non funny anecdote that has stuck with me for at least 10 years now. At one point on the knitlist, there was a minor flamewar over whether or not to use center pull balls.

No, really!

Since this is something that is truly determined by personal preference, most people had by then chimed in with very educational me too posts, which simply prolonged the “discussion". Some people were quite eloquent (and convincing) in defense of center pull balls.

One good reason: since you pull from the center, you don’t have the problem of a ball of yarn bouncing around, possibly getting lost on nasty subway floors, or attracting loving feline attention that a traditionally wound ball would have.

Also, typically the yarn is under less tension in a center pull ball - therefore there is less chance of the yarn being deformed, and less chance of random portions of whatever you’re knitting to get distorted after washing due to the yarn itself shrinking back to it’s normal length.

However, one lady’s defense of the traditionally wound ball was succinct and a bit strange. It was along these lines, “Well, you wierdos can use your egg shaped center pull all you like, but I must have round yarn balls. Ha! Keep your eggs, I’ll continue to knit with my cute round balls!”

Surprisingly enough, the thread died at that point.

For some reason, this always struck me as completely nutty. I mean, WHO CARES what your yarn balls LOOK like? It’s the finished project that I care about! Why not put it in the most optimal form for the finished project? Also, am I the only person who has cats that like to play with the round balls?

Project update - I’m now working on the sleeves of my sweater, pics when I find my camera.