The SSYM

Friday was one of those days. My plans fell apart early and, since I was out of the house anyway, I gave up on them and went shopping. I even managed to buy yarn – some plain Patonyle for sock toes and heels.

At Bunnings I went hunting for materials to make the Self-striping Yarn Measure out of. All the pieces just fell into my hands, already at the right length, all in stock. It was amazing. I was on a roll, so when I got home I did a bit of drilling and a bit of sawing and a bit of sanding and ended up with this:

The distance from the top rack of pins to the bottom is the length of yarn I’d need to knit one row of a sock. The rods on either side are lengths of screw, so the distance can be adjusted to suit other sock row sizes. I added a normal, long screw to the base of one rack then sawed off the end, so the whole thing sits in the base of my music stand.

The yellow and red lines show how the yarn would be wound on if I wanted alternating stripes of six rows of yellow and six of red. Once the yarn was all wound on, I’d mark where the colours change with ties, slide the yarn off, and I’m ready to dye it.

Here’s the SSYM disassembled:

It can be disassembled furthur, by taking the pegs out, but that takes time and I’m lazy.

Assembled, it’s a bit wobbly due to the slight flexibility of the screw rods. I reckon a bit of elastic strung from opposite corners of the frame might fix that. We’ll see.

I have got some Bendy 4ply to dye up, but that might have to wait. I feel like that cold everyone else has suffered has finally found me.

3 thoughts on “The SSYM

  1. Thankyou!

    The music stand has prooved to be very useful. I have a portable wool winder my beau bought in the UK at a car boot sale. It comes in two pieces: a stand and the windery bit. But the stand is a bit unstable, expecially with heavy skeins, so the beau rigged up a little connector bit so I can put it into the music stand base.

    And it holds patterns!

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