Fairly recently I came across the concept of a yarn bowl – a heavy bowl with a curved slot in it. You put your ball of yarn in the bowl, slip the strand you are using into the slot, place the bowl on the floor and the yarn is fed out without the ball rolling around all over the place getting dirty and entangled in the furniture/shoes/dog. The first one of these I saw was on a German website, making it prohibitively expensive when the shipping was taken into account… and anyway, there would have been loads of yarn-bowl-miles associated with it.

The happy snail yarn bowl

I’ve never seen one made by a local potter, so a little Googling was required. As I should have expected, etsy listed a number of sources. But I was absolutely astonished to see that the Little Wren Pottery sells a happy snail yarn bowl! There really aren’t many happy snails in the world so I just had to have one. I was made to order for me by hand and arrived yesterday.

The yarn is fed through the spiral slot in the snail’s shell – brilliant

OK, it’s from North Yorkshire, so does have a few miles associated with it, but I’m really delighted to have supported a small business and to have added to my small collection of happy snails – thank you Victoria.