Taking It To the Mats

This picture makes my blocking look crooked, but it's really the picture that's wonky. I was standing on a chair with the camera held overhead, and the angle is funny. (Proving once again that I am a genius with a camera.)

I thought I would talk a little about the blocking process because I do things a little differently than some.

First, I soak the pieces for 30 minutes in cold water with a good blob (1 or 2 tablespoons) of hair conditioner dissolved into the water. Dissolve the conditioner in the water before you add the wool, or you'll get uneven distribution. The conditioner will soften the wool dramatically. It won't hide all the crunch in a rustic yarn, but it will mask the roughness and let the blocking go a little more easily. Cheap conditioner works just as well as the expensive stuff.

Next I insert blocking wires on the straight edges of the garment -- in this case, the side edges of the body piece -- and use those to stabilize the fabric as I pull and smooth and squoosh it into shape. The actual shaping can take a few minutes, but inserting the wires will shave a lot of time off the total. Pin the straight edges first, too, because those make good reference points for shaping the rest of the piece. (My mats have grid lines scored into them, so I can use those to make sure things are straight, too.

Not everyone uses conditioner and wires to block pieces like these. The other tools I use -- a straight-edge ruler and tape measure -- are pretty ordinary.

In this case, I wanted to block the sleeve to the body piece to make perfectly sure that the saddle was blocked to the proper measurements. So I'm doing one sleeve plus the front now and the other sleeve plus the back later.

There's still quite a lot of finishing work on this sweater before it will be wearable. Not just seaming, but knitting the braided bands at the collar, cuffs and hem. The bands are knitted on sideways. I'll post pictures of those as I do them, because it's kind of a cool technique that could come in handy if you ever need to lengthen something.