Birthday gifts working together!

I got to wind a skein of yarn today using my lovely umbrella swift! I used the lovely, white sock yarn that my brother gave me and dyed it using kool aid. Here are my results:

Beautiful skein of yarn all ready for dyeing!

It looks like a snake! I tried to stripe it in a palindrome pattern in the hope that it will create stripes in the warp. I read about this technique on Weavezine.

After winding into a ball! (Which is really easy to do when winding from a swift!)

I'm SO happy with it!!

I can't wait to see what it looks like as a warp!

I'm pretty excited. I am so happy and thankful that I have all these wonderful tools now. When I first got my loom last year I had one reed, one shuttle and 6 bobbins. No way to dye yarn, no ball winder to take messy skeins and make them usable, no swift to wind skeins to prepare for dyeing, and no bobbin winder!! I had to wind all of my bobbins for weaving by hand! It was awful. It takes about 30 minutes to wind a bobbin by hand. Anyway, I'm very happy to be on my way to having a fully working studio. :)

~JoAnna