Hunh? Lazy Kates and Niddy Noddies?

Lazy Kates, Niddy Noddies, and Swifts are tools used by handspinners to make their work simpler. A Lazy Kate is essentially an arrangement of dowels on which you can place your bobbins when you are making two-ply or three-ply yarn. (My spinning wheel has one built right into the base.) The yarn slips off each bobbin at a uniform rate so you can create a smooth, even ply.

A Niddy Noddy is used to collect a skein of yarn right off the spinning wheel. It is nothing more than a wooden rod with another piece set perpendicular to it at each end; the two perpendiculars are then set at right angles to each other. (This might be a little hard to picture, even though it is a very simple tool. You may want to Google these terms so you can see what each gadget looks like.) This arrangement allows you to wrap the yarn around it from point to point without tangling your arm up in the middle of it! Spinners in earlier days used to sing a niddy-noddy song with lots of verses so they could tell when they had wrapped enough yarn to make a full skein.

A Swift is an elegant contraption used for winding a skein of yarn into a ball. Do you remember sitting for endless afternoons with your arms out in front of you, holding a skein of yarn while your mom rolled miles of yarn into a ball and grumbled at you to sit still? The Swift does that for you (except for the grumbling!). It's a beautiful apparatus that opens out into something that looks like a giant wooden snowflake and spins slowly as you pull the yarn off it, making a satisfying swishing hum while preventing those pesky tangles. So much of handspinning is wonderfully relaxing. In fact, few things in life are more peaceful than sitting at your wheel on a snowy afternoon, your foot on the wooden pedal, the batt slipping through your fingers strand by strand as the new, soft yarn fills the bobbin, and colorful birds gather at the feeder outside your window. Ahhh . . .