Wishing for a new tool

Have you ever wished someone would invent that cool new tool?

The one where they take one of
these

and combine it with this?

It looks to me like there is enough room in the ball winder to stuff a computer chip inside and space for a digital display on the base. Until someone markets such a thing, I will have to resort to a multi-stage approach to achieve what I need want.


This is the deal, someone gives you a nice skein of yarn and you just want to knit a pair of socks. That skein has to be wound into a ball first, and because you would like your socks to end up about the same size, it would be really nice if you knew when half of the yarn skein was in the ball.
What you do is wind the whole skein into one ball and then put it into a bowl on your scale (luckily the scale I have has a wonderful tare function for the bowl). Then you start to wind a second ball from the first.

You wind on past here,

and here,

 

until you get to here.

 

You end up with two balls of yarn to knit two socks the same size. A little extra step, but it works.

 

Except, I could have done without some of the help I got.

 

Maybe she'll get to stay in her room next time.