You know knitting has become an obsession when...

...you own a pair of these.

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The strange-looking wooden contraption on the left is called an umbrella swift and its smaller companion to the right is a ball winder. Used in tandom, these beauties wind my tangled hanks of yarn into neat and tidy center-pull balls in a matter of seconds, when I would otherwise sit and wind them for 10 - 30 minutes by hand (depending on the severity of the tangling). To illustrate, the hanks go from looking like this:



to this:



The center-pull balls are nice because they are flat on the bottom and therefore don't roll away constantly like hand-wound balls. Umbrella swifts and ball winders are to knitters what global positioning systems are to drivers; not entirely necessary for reaching the desired endpoint, completely overpriced, but very good at increasing efficiency and soooo fun to use. To reduce the guilt I feel for shelling out good money for these not-entirely-necessary toys, I am calling it a graduation gift to myself. :)

One of the first hanks I was most excited to ravel up into a ball was my newly acquired "Thai Spice" Cornucopia yarn (made from 100% corn). I have been reading about corn yarn for months now, planning all the wonderful projects I could whip this lovely new ecological and renewable fiber into. So I was of course filled with eager anticipation when it arrived. However, it soon proved to be more mangled than any other hank I'd tackled before, and Ilya (aka Resident Problem-Solver) took over the job of unwinding it by hand. An hour later, it was clear why it had become such a rat's nest in the first place:



Yes count them, there were 35 individual strands of yarn. For those who have never worked with yarn, usually you are dealing with one loooooong strand, which makes knitting a large garment much easier. I suspect that this hank was the victim of some lazy employee at the yarn mill who then slipped it through quality control - or maybe corn yarn is just weaker in spots due to its biodegradability and therefore breaks easily? In any case, it's bad. When knitting with many short pieces of yarn, you must weave in or tie off 2 "tails" of yarn for each knitted strand, which is a big pain. If I were to go ahead and make the baby dress I had been planning to make, I would have to weave in 70 ends afterwards! Ugh! So here is my question to you: what should I do with this yarn? I was so excited to get it and now that I have it I feel determined to put it to good use in some way. There are about 100 yards total and all the pieces vary in length. Your thoughts, please!