On a Dark and Stormy Night

I came home and found this in my post box:
Whee! My ball winder! I forgot to take a picture of it set up without yarn on it. This is my first attempt to wind something into a ball (and yes, it does take a little practice (as I found out)).
Ta da! A perfectly wound yarn cake. I actually took my hand wound ball of hand dyed yarn (Autumn Leaves) and rewound it to look a little cleaner.
Then I may have wound up the remainder of some other hand dyed that was sitting in my stash but didn't take pictures because I figured I might be the only person who gets really excited about winding yarn into balls...

I also spent today building. I had planned to go for a bike ride after work but when I left it was pouring down rain. It's hurricane season now and living in the Southeastern United States (a.k.a. Hurricane Docking Station #1) means that we get the left over storms after the hurricanes make land fall. Over the next week we are supposed to have another hit (there have been 3 big ones already). Anyways, I couldn't go riding so I went to Wal-Mart to try and find supplies for a hand made swift that Rebecca Chaky designed (got all the info off Ravelry).
I found everything except the doll pins and doll pin stands. But I'm ever resourceful and bought some dowel rods instead. Then I proceeded to drill holes in the yard sticks every 2 inches. It took a little trial and error to find the right size drill bit but I erred to the side of caution and started small.
See, nice little holes. I'm sure my neighbors thought I was crazy running a power drill in my apartment but whatever.
Now all I have to do is pop in 4 dowels at the spacing I want. The dowel below is kind of broken because I tried to snap it and make it a little smaller. Didn't work too well. Also, Rebecca only takes her swift out to accommodate 62" skeins. I drilled holes all the way to the edge because I thought with hand dyeing I might want to make long skeins for color spacing.
Here's the main unit drying on my living room floor. There is a lazy susan that will go underneath it and turn the whole thing. I'll probably end up gluing those parts together but for now I just want it to dry so I can try it out!
Meanwhile, someone had to investigate the new ball winder.