forgetgutenberg

It took me long enough to realize this – but boy howdy, blocking is like magic. 

There are before and after pictures, but it has been a very long night with perhaps a bit too much shoveling involved, and I don’t have the energy to dig up my camera cables. Instead, I’ll write about blocking.

Did I mention it’s like magic? I had a couple of scarves (finished last year, before I discovered the joys of pinning damp things), and today seemed like a good day to actually finish them properly. One of them was this sort of shortish lumpy Van Dyke lace scarf in Malabrigo (I’m surprised it hadn’t felted as revenge for being ignored, given that Malabrigo seems to felt if you look at it funny…) and one of them was actually something I finished recently, a pine tree lace pattern in some Cascade yarn. They’re both, erm, much longer – like, well, actually scarf-length. And the lace! It opened up in the most amazing way… I know, the seasoned knitters are all out there going “and what have we all been telling you for years now,” but sometimes it takes some hands-on experience to believe this kind of thing. After all, somebody says “no, really, you get this piece of knitting wet, and pin it out, and all of a sudden it’s flat and open and the stitches even out and if it’s lace it opens up so you can actually see the yarnovers” and actually it sounds kind of crazy.  

Doing shawls is even better. There was this triangle shawl (really satisfying knit, the kind of incredibly simple thing that looks awfully classy), right, that I finished probably last year sometime. It was, oh, kind of big enough. The yarn was pretty nice, so it was ok. It just wasn’t really worth the effort. Well. Let me tell you, pinning that out was … enlightening. I think it may have nearly doubled in size. I think the top edge might actually be the length of my wingspan, and the bottom point stretched out beyond belief – unless you’ve been blocking all your lace, like a clever person, and then you’d believe it – and there are visible yarnovers and, well, it looks kind of amazing.

The final thing, and the one that I am just astonished by, is this feather and fan wrap I did back before I lived somewhere cold, so I didn’t really care that it was tiny. It was maybe three feet long, although quite possibly shorter, and a foot wide. We’re talking barely long enough to wrap around my neck, and not really wide enough to wrap in that useful over-the-head way one ought to be able to wear a shawl. It blocked out to the width of a full-sized mattress, and a good couple of feet wide. Ok, to be honest, this isn’t actually all that surprising – I did knit it on largish needles in this strangely unspun yarn – but wow, it’s stunning.

I like this finishing things plan. It means I can start something new. (After I finish my socks, ’cause my toes are cold.) 

So there are a couple of posts I thought I’d made last month (Good grief. Time does fly this time of year. Seems like only last week it was warm enough to sit outside without gloves on.) which clearly I was making up in my head. Also a couple of newish ones. Fortunately, the procrastination has some side-benefits. Most of which come in the form of pictures. First nifty thing – one of the lovely ladies of Wednesday night knitting had a party with fun activities – sugar skulls! Which I’d been wanting to play with for ages. They were absolutely as much fun as I thought they’d be.

Second nifty thing – I blocked some more lace. The red scarf (which I assure you is actually a nice dark red and not that awful bright orangey thing my camera wants you to believe it is) was finished something like two years ago, and languished in a box being all small and not actually very interesting until last week, when … well, blocking is totally magic. The green doily got blocked almost as soon as I finished casting off, ’cause it was so darn neat and so intensely lumpy and awful straight off the needles. I think I might want to make more doilies; they’re incredibly satisfying and so much faster than shawls.

Speaking of which, yeah, I finally finished the blue jellyfish shawl. It’s not blocked yet, though, since I need something like my bed to pin it to and frankly I’d like to be able to sleep on a nice dry mattress.I’ve got blue silky wool to finish the nerdy morse code scarf, but there’s some major charting left to do, so that’s going to have to wait. It’s not like I don’t have anything to do in the meantime, though, as I’ve got twenty-five rows left on the doily blanket (the one brooklyntweed posted on way back in august) and a couple of pairs of socks and scarves for relatives.  Speaking of which, why did I agree to make a non-knitter a pair of wool socks? Aside from the fact that the colorway had her name written all over it. That doesn’t count.  Special bonus picture – a finished nautilus in cashmere and angora, with fancy button eyes and loose ends like you wouldn’t believe.

Now, if my time-management skills were up to par, I’d say, oh, I’ll finish my blanket and the second sock of the current pair, and get to work on some of the weirder non-knitting projects I have on back burners. I think I’ve known myself long enough to realize just how foolish that kind of assumption is. I choose to blame the lack of space to keep my sewing machine set up for the quilt not being done. Ah, well, it’s not like I’ve got hard and fast deadlines on any of these things. Actually, that’s quite refreshing when I stop to think about it. Working on a deadline has its advantages, certainly, but there’s a whole lot to be said for leisurely progress (as long as there is progress, and I think I’m at least still managing that).  While I’m at this ridiculously long update, there’s been some changes to the website, including a shiny new anti-thesis proposal. I’m a whole lot happier with this anti-thesis than I was with my thesis, which is probably indicative of some major attitude problem on my part. This surprises nobody, I’m sure. In any case, now that I’ve got an anti-thesis proposal that actually makes sense with my theories of artistic practice and creation, all that remains is to … focus on making and stop fretting about finishing or how I never seem to have time to do everything (a gal does have to sleep once in a while, unfortunately).