When we were organizing items that we received for this year’s exhibit, the blue item in the picture was among them. It looked vaguely familiar and I wanted to call it a “niddy-noddy”. After some research, I realized that I had seen a “niddy-noddy”, but it didn’t look anything like our item.
The niddy-noddy was used to make a skein of yarn. It would have a carved center bar with cross bars offset at 90 degrees. On further reflection, I remember seeing one made of whalebone in a museum.
One thing we are good at here at the Historical Society is finding out about stuff and since it looked like it might be used with knitting yarn, we gave the job of researching to Cecelia. Sure enough, she found our item on Peggy Erhart’s web page and it is (drum roll here) a “Knitting Knobby”. I can hear a lot of you saying, “I knew that”. You can also see how I confused niddy-noddy and knitting knobby.
While we found no exact date for the first commercially made knitting knobby, it was before most things were made of plastic and before 1963, when zip codes found their way on to our mail.
If you’re old enough, you might remember taking a wooden spool (back when thread was sold on wooden spools) and putting a crown of small nails around the top. These were the original knitting knobbies, if they had a name. There are directions as to what you do with the yarn, wrapping it around the top and pulling it through the center. There’s also a needle involved. They seem pretty complicated to me, but you can have them if you want to create what Peggy Erhart referred to as a “yarn worm”.
You essentially make a rounded length of yarn that can be as long as you want it to be. There are suggestions on her site of items to make with the yarn worm. They include coasters, flowers that can be sewn on coats or jackets, a one-piece dog collar and leash (I assume for a very small dog or someone with a lot of patience) and my favorite, a whistle and jack knife chain. This is my favorite because of one of the directions. After explaining how to attach your whistle and knife, it adds that you can slip the jack knife into your shirt pocket and then comes my favorite instruction, “Always keep your jack-knife closed when in your pocket”.
The other item in the picture is a handmade crochet hook.
By Connie Eshbach