The Cardinal Crafter: The Craft Collaboration

We have pets, ergo, we have pet hair embellishing our furniture. It would be ok if everything I crocheted was in a variegated black and white motif but I like color. I have been racking my brain to come up with a way of keeping as much of the pet hair out of my projects as possible. It's great if I come across a center pull skein because then the little bugger isn't rolling around on my couch as I work. Unfortunately I'm learning that most skeins aren't center pull (unless I'm doing something wrong). I tried putting my yarn in one of those nifty Snapware containers, a big plastic food storage bowl and even an empty coffee canister. Those worked ok, but still not quite what I was looking for. I stumbled across this idea on Pintrest the other night:

Genius!! How simple! How thrifty! But hmmm...how can I put my own spin on it, since I didn't have a box like that or knitting needles? Enter The Craft Collaboration between the hubby and I. He's a pretty handy guy to have around and I knew we could come up with something. Instead of the knitting needle we figured dowel rods would work just as well. I happened to have a Sterilite "mesh" basket to replace the cardboard box. A trip to Lowe's and 3 rods later my yarn holding system was complete! He made 6 rods, 3 long and 3 short to fit my various skeins. I proudly threaded my first skein and got to work....until it was time to pull more yarn and we had a problem. It didn't rotate off the way I thought but it did work for keeping my yarn off the furniture and collecting pet hair. Time for tweaking. I had noticed that when the yarn was just coiled around the skein (a product of ripping out a mistake) it worked great. Since almost all of my yarn is wound like the pic above I needed to come up with a solution. I know I could go out and buy a yarn winder to make my entire stash into center pull balls but those suckers are expensive and I'd rather spend my cash on the yarn itself. Once again, time for another collaboration between the hubby and I. (Did I mention he's handy to have around?) We figured out that an electric yarn winder is like a drill so out to his workshop he went. He came back in the house with his cordless, variable speed electric drill fitted with a cut off golf club shaft. (Could we be any more redneck?) It.Works.Great!