Skills to pay the bills

Hey Yarn Heart-ers, Neuro Knitter's bottle blocking photo a while back got me thinking about how every knitter has some clever trick to share with the rest of us. (NK has dozens!) So, let's share them! Mine, you'll notice, reveal two things about me. First, I am a penny-pinching pack rat. Second, I just got married and have lots of packaging from lots of new household items.

One trick I'm fond of is saving the plastic zippered bags that sheets and pillows and such come in. They are nice sturdy little storage containers and come in infinitely varied sizes. Smaller ones for a sweater's worth of yarn; bigger ones for your sub-stash of a certain fiber. They can be easily put in out of the way corners without getting tangled or musty. A penny saved is a penny more toward yarn...

Here's my stash, all bagged up in the basement, and my "in progress" basket that stays upstairs.

Similarly, a lot of sheets these days come in drawstring bags of the same fabric. These make the perfect bag to felt things in. Unlike pillowcases, which many patterns recommend, these bags have draw strings already built in. Awesome.

Oops - this project shrunk way too much!

I save card board toliet paper rolls to use as the base for winding my own center-pull balls. They're just the perfect size. And what a good feeling to do something useful with something so banal. You don't need a photo of that.

Finally, S gave me a great idea the other day. We've been doing our socks toe-up, two-at-once, on two circular needles lately. This is the bomb, except that if you're working from one ball of yarn (one string from the center, one string from the outside) the two strings get tangled. By coincidence, I found a hole in the heel of a pair of really stretchy slipper socks that evening. So, off with it's foot! And voila - the old sock becomes a yarn ball keeper.

Here's a closeup of jaywalker... a project that some of us are more fond of than others...

I know for a fact that S has some really good tricks she's shared with me... but I'll let her post on those.

Many thanks to my lovely assistant today, Carat.