Sunday, February 12, 2012

Necessity is a Real Mother.

I decided I did not want to Navajo ply my second spinning project, since that would mean reducing the beautiful sunny yellow stuff to a twisted mess like the first skein I plied up. Instead, I decided it was CRAFT TIME! and went around the house trying to find various supplies to create a Lazy Kate so I could ply the yarn together off 2 bobbins and see what I got.
This does NOT remedy the whole problem of being without a niddy-noddy, but that's okay. Turns out the chair back worked beautifully for that.
The idea was to use strictly materials I already had lying around. If it was ~literally~ lying around, so much the better. So here's what I did.

Got together 2 cardboard drink holders from a well known donut chain that also sells coffee and stacked them to keep them more rigid. Located a media mailer box that was set up to protect one of my albums that arrived off of eBay that already had 2 pieces of inner cardboard inside for extra security. Grabbed 2 size 10 aluminum needles (purely a guess on the width vs. the bobbins) and then set to work.




I placed the drink caddy upside down on the album box to get an idea of how to center it, then I drove the aluminum knitting needle down through the bottom cup holder on both caddies and straight through to the album box. Then I kept pushing until I felt it hit carpet. (NOTE - I did this on carpet because sofas and wooden tables and counters do not play well with jamming aluminum sharp things). You can see where I screwed up the first hole and then made holes matching up the box and the caddy.



This next part is sort of a foregone conclusion, but I then stuck the needles up through the botton and through the drink caddies. Because of all the cardboard it had to go through to be upright, they're pretty much set there and unless some idiot and/or a giant animal messes with it, those needles are very stable. Best part that I forgot to even check for, not only are they raised so that the base will be more free to rotate, but they're far enough apart that they won't hit one another or get tangled!




I finished it up by dropping the finished bobbin on one and stored my other currently unused bobbin on the other. It looks rather fetching, and I can't wait to try and ply off of it to see if it holds up well! In the very least it'll hold me until I can get a more sturdy Lazy Kate to work off of. See how perfectly the size 10's fit?? I'm pretty psyched at my DIY-ed-ness on this thing.
I thought I might as well share this just in case somebody was stuck without a Lazy Kate and also potentially very broke. Also, its eco-friendly and dolphin-free and whatnot, so you can feel good for using things in an unusual way!

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