Throwing a Winter Block Party

or Tale of Two Shawls

I know for some people the hardest part of finishing a project is weaving in ends. I won’t claim to like this particular step, but it’s not the hardest thing for me to do. I have a yarn needle sitting among the things on my desk, and I have work meetings where the need to pay attention is nicely complimented by the ability to have something not very complicated in my hands.

No, where I get stuck is blocking… especially the pretty shawls I like to make. Socks? No problem – I can toss those in the wash and hang to dry. But if I want that lovely lovely lace, then I need to do things properly with shawls.

Part of the snag is that my brain hasn’t caught up with my living circumstances. It still tells me that the only place I can block a shawl is on the bed, and thus I need to do it first thing after I wake up so it’s dry before bed time.

In reality… I have a basement where I can hang things to dry (if they don’t need to be pinned out), a basement sink where I can sit the bucket of water as things soak so they aren’t in the way, a guest bedroom with guest bed, and a bit open space in the living room for larger shawls. Also, I have blocking mats, t-pins and blocking wires.¹

All of this is to say, there is no good reason that one of the shawls blocked recently had been sitting around sadly in a limp little pile in my office for months.

When I finished Mimi, I knew I wanted to wear it right away, which meant blocking it. So I got my mats out. It went first.

See how nice it looks?

And a little close up of that lace edge which I actually blocked out properly with T-pins instead of patting into shape and crossing my fingers:

This is exactly how I envisioned it. My adjustment to use up more yarn left me with just a few grams, enough that there was no yarn chicken, but not so much I felt I wasted yarn or lost the effect. The white really comes into play just as the lace gets going, and I think it looks like frosting on a cake, or snowflakes² against a winter dawn sky³.

I pretty much took this off the blocking mats and put it right around my shoulders. Then I soaked the next shawl and laid it out, again making right and proper use of T-pins.

 

I think this one came out pretty well too. Again, it’s a pattern I’d made before but I enjoyed it so much I knit it up again. I just love the colors in this yarn, and I have more to make matching socks and perhaps some mitts or a hat. It was a limited edition colorway and in a fit of FOMO (which I don’t regret), two skeins of sock and a skein of twisty sock jumped into my cart. This shawl took up a little bit more than a skein of the sock. Literally – I started the second ball during the bind off!

So now I have two new shawls to add to my already not exactly small collection. I’ve worn both several times since blocking them, though mostly Mimi as the Tuva’s Arrows being smaller is better suited to somewhat less cold weather.

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1. Well… I couldn’t find my blocking wires until after everything was blocked this round. I took them to the office/craft space apparently. Which makes no sense when you realize I have no water there and thus do not block things there… ↩︎
2. I am drinking hot cocoa with marshmallows as I write this post, and it feels appropriate. ↩︎
3. Also I have figured out footnotes. Sorry / not sorry ↩︎