{"id":872,"date":"2006-05-04T09:32:00","date_gmt":"2006-05-04T13:32:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kissmyknits.com\/?p=872"},"modified":"2006-05-04T09:32:00","modified_gmt":"2006-05-04T13:32:00","slug":"blocking-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kissmyknits.com\/?p=872","title":{"rendered":"Blocking"},"content":{"rendered":"

I had hoped to begin blocking Tyrathia’s scarf last night, but realized I still had some prep work to do.
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\nI got some cheap Elmer’s foam board<\/a> at Michael’s and proceeded to mark off 1 inch squares so that I’d be able to pin the scarf in a straight line. Lines were made in pencil, as I decided that of the materials I had on-hand, that had the least chance of rubbing off onto the finished garment. The upcoming rinse would prove that I didn’t need to get so hung up on the trueness of the color. More on that in a bit.
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\nThen, because I couldn’t find blocking wires at any nearby stores, and didn’t want my blocking pins making little points along the garment edge, I ran a cotton string through the edges of the scarf. Sadly, I did not have the foresight to run one along the cast-on and cast-off edges, and so had to pin the top and bottom edges about every 1\/4 inch so that the pins wouldn’t leave little peaks. Fortunately – and I really feel good about this and want to stress it to anyone else doing this – I did have the foresight to run the string through BEFORE rinsing the scarf.<\/i> It would have been so much harder to do this while the scarf was wet, I think.<\/p>\n

So, it’s into the sink for a rinse, because there’s still a little stiffness in one spot due to milk I spilled on it during knitting. Oops. I had rinsed it once after that and there’d been some bleeding, so I also wanted to be sure there wouldn’t be any extra dye loss if Tyrathia<\/a> needed to handwash it. Good concern.<\/p>\n

These are shots of the individual cool-water rinses I did. A little soap was included in rinse 2.
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\nAfter five rinses I gave up on seeing clear water. Tyrathia, don’t wash this with anything else.<\/center><\/p>\n

Then to the blocking board! I stretched this baby within an inch of its life. CD for scale below so you can see size difference between blocked and unblocked.
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<\/center><\/p>\n

I added extra pins in the places that seemed to have significant bowing. I think having the string there will help the tension be distributed more evenly and decrease the “pointiness” of the edges.<\/p>\n

It’s blocking on the dining room table, which doubles as a workspace for my husband’s electronics and beer brewing. I’ve removed all the chairs from around the table so that the cat won’t jump up and sleep on it.<\/p>\n

So I go into my meeting in 15 minutes with the confidence and odd combination of excitement and peacefulness that comes from successfully tackling a new technique. As for the scarf, all that’s left is to wait for it to dry, and see what happens!
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I had hoped to begin blocking Tyrathia’s scarf last night, but realized I still had some prep work to do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[56],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kissmyknits.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/872"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kissmyknits.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kissmyknits.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kissmyknits.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kissmyknits.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=872"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kissmyknits.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/872\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kissmyknits.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=872"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kissmyknits.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=872"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kissmyknits.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=872"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}