Saved by the Bell, or, Bell, Book and Candle

Another great thing about the yarn bell.



Here is a yarn bell given to me by my great friend Susanne.




Visit her website for all kinds of yummy stuff: http://www.susannejames.com/. She is a potter and also a knitter, and makes the most gorgeous pottery. She uses natural motifs and foresty colors and combines usefulness with beauty. An aesthetic pragmatist’s dream! Anyway, I was using a bell she gave me for a particularly delicate alpaca fingering yarn because the bell helps protect the fibre, and also helps prevent knotting by keeping the yarncake nicely motionless. By personal experience, I can say that another of its merits is it keeps the yarn free from candlewax.

You know how sometimes you get a scented candle in a jar, and the wick doesn’t sufficiently burn the wax, so you are left with half a jar of unusable but nicely scented candle? I found that if you set the candle jar on something warm (I put it on a trivet on top of my woodstove) all of the wax melts down to the bottom of the jar in one useable blob. When it’s soft, push a tea light candle (minus the foil holder) into the wax. Voila. You have given another life to that useable wax. I was just experimenting with this idea, when a blonde moment overcame me and I pushed the tea light into a jar right beside my knitting. Oops. Should have done it in the sink. I had not estimated the rate of cooling properly – the top had formed a crust and there was a boil of melted wax in the middle, and when I pushed a little too hard the hot wax spewed out (really far as it happened) and flew all over my knitting and my coffee table, and books and magazines and even the floor six feet away. Not one of my more graceful moments.

Anyway, no harm done, except that the knitting had tiny blobules of dried wax on it. As you know it’s difficult to get wax off knitted fabric, I’m not sure what the old housewives would recommend—I seem to remember something about ice cubes. I didn’t have to resort to that remedy however, as the temperature here is minus 30, minus 41 with the windchill, and cold enough to freeze the wax off the devil’s nads. Everything had these teeny (nicely smelling) waxy beads, everything EXCEPT that is, the yarn that was safely ensconced in Susanne’s yarn bell.

So hooray for Susanne, hooray for yarn bells! Susanne, I will be buying a couple more from you, I’ll be in touch!