I'm a superstar!

It looks like my new Star Trek pot holders are a success! In less than 24 hours since I posted the pattern on Ravelry, it's already been favourited 99 times, is in 48 queues and has 5 comments. That's more than my previous two patterns, the ostie de cozy and the rose choker ever got combined since April and January respectively. I guess this is my five minutes (or few hours) of internet fame... Anyway, I guess there are a whole lot of Trekkie knitters out there!

In other news, I want a swift. This is a tool used to wind hanks of yarn into balls of yarn by stretching it out over a rotating frame, that moves around as the ball is wound. It's usually adjustable in size, which allows it to accommodate many different sizes of yarn. I just spent a couple of hours winding 100g a hank of sock yarn into a ball by hand, a process slowed down by the fact that I had to rotate by hand the yarn which was wrapped around the back of a chair and my left foot. Anyway, it looks something like this:



Unfortunately, most are around $65 in price, which is a little much, especially when I use hanks so rarely (though I just got a shipment of sweater yarn from Webs, and they're all in hanks). I found an Instructables tutorial on how to make one, but given the fact that I live in a small apartment and don't have a garage filled with random pieces of lumber or the proper tools for woodworking, I have a feeling that that's not a viable option. I suppose I can always just go down to the Purple Purl and see if they'd let me use theirs... or maybe there's a yarn shop closer that would let me use theirs if they have one. I don't care too much about a ball winder (though they're much cheaper) since I've gotten pretty fast at winding balls by hand, and I don't mind if my balls don't look like those neat little cakes that ball winders make, but a swift sure would be handy.

Update: I've found this on ebay, and I still have 29 days to decide, so maybe I'll go for it. It seems like an entirely decent price, compared to some of the other ones.

Update #2: My friend Stevie has agreed to make me a swift using that tutorial! Hurray! Also, I found a recipe for Pie Pops! How could this day get any better?