Blocking Day

So ever since I've started knitting for serious, I've been hearing talk about this blocking thing. Patterns say, "Block the sleeves to the same size before assembling," or this witty knitting-tips book I saw somewhere says, "Don't believe what they say - it won't come out in the blocking," or the Stitch n' Bitchers say, "I'm sure this shawl will open up after it's blocked."

Yeah, whatever. If I want my sleeves the same size, then I'll knit them that way, and if I want my shawl more open, if I ever made a shawl, well I would sure as hell just use some bigger needles.


The theory of blocking has to do with fiber-memory. Natural fibers like wool or cotton, when they get wet, learn the shape they are placed into and remember it when they dry. The idea of blocking is, then, to wet your knitting down, to shape, stretch, and scrunch it perfectly, and then to let it dry.

"Oh please," I have often silently scoffed, "- that will never work!" Knitted fabric is like a liquid - it drapes over whatever form you place it on, but it doesn't inherently have a shape itself. Fiber-memory can't actually be that strong.

Even if it was, the implication is also that blocking is temporary: what if I spent ages perfectly blocking my sweater, and the next day my sweater got rained on, I'd have to block it all over again or it would dry and remember the shape of rain.



Now a couple of months ago, I completed knitting my Ireland sweater, which was my final project on the Ireland study-abroad program this summer. I'd been working on this sweater since August, and finishing it was a huge accomplishment for me. Trouble was, when I put it on, the shoulders puffed up like the 60's, and I just looked like a goofis!

I didn't want to admit that my sweater made me look like a goofis, so I compensated by conspicuously never wearing it, and I told people that all the joy had come in the knitting process - wearing it was not important. Not a complete lie, but yeah kinda.

I grudgingly took my sweater to the Stitch n' Bitch at Panera a week or two after I'd finished knitting it, terrified that they would make me try it on for them. I would self-consciously put on the sweater, looking at my toes, and the ladies would avert their eyes too, not wanted to say the truth, that the shoulders were horribly awkward. Anyway, they didn't make me try it on, but I explained the problem to them anyway. And the ladies said, "Oh I bet that will come out in the blocking!"

WHAT?! No.

But I wondered of course, what if they're right? Maybe I should actually try blocking it and just see what happens?

Anyway, I put off actually blocking the thing for about two months. I'd told my mom that I was going to do it though, and she kept asking me whether I'd done it yet. When she asked I would vaguely say I would do it soon, not really wanting to.

What made me finally bite the bullet was my spinning. One of the most essential steps in spinning is to wash the yarn once you have spun and plied it. Otherwise, the yarn will unravel. But by washing and drying (that is, blocking) the spun yarn, the yarn learns to the remember the twist and does not unravel. This had worked for me. Maybe blocking would too.


So Sunday morning I awoke, and it was blocking day!

I'd studied the theory closely with the help of this and this youtube video, and without further ado, I filled up the bathtub. I thought my dad might yell at me for wasting water, but he didn't. I soaked my Ireland sweater, the argyle sweater-vest I knitted several years ago, my newly completed gravitational lensing mittens, my new handspun hat, and the wool sweater I'd gotten on Black Friday that I hadn't really wanted to wear since Leo accidentally threw it in the trash.

While the knitting stewed, I got out some towels, and I fetched Momo's pin cushion.

One by one, I removed the things from the slowly-draining tub. As instructed, I wrapped them in towels and stepped on them to press out the water. Then I lay them out on Laura's bed, shaped them, and pinned them down.


I blew the fan for around 24 hours, and when I got home from work today, things were basically dry. I tried on my sweater. It was... INCREDIBLE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Everything was true, and though the shoulders aren't perfect, they sit about a hundred times better on me. Even if the sweater is still a bit itchy, I will definitely be able to wear it now. My knitting days are transformed.

love, Jimmy


PS - my two mittens? after I blocked them, they are like totally the same size.

Zero t(w)o Mittens!

So it's been more than two weeks since I posted here! Let's change that.

The first weekend in February, I spent Saturday night at Carleton for the Mid-Winter Ball. Of course I was really excited for all of the dancing and seeing of friends, but in one way I was equally excited to head home:

Friday night I'd stayed up until 3AM finishing up spinning, plying, winding, and washing my red 2-ply yarn!

This was the second batch of yarn that I'd spun, and this batch was substantially more difficult. More difficult because I tried to spin the yarn as thinly and evenly as possible! This means I was letting fewer wool fibers into the yarn with each drafting pull. Because they have less friction in between them when there are fewer of them, thin yarn also requires more twist than thick yarn to stay solid.

Spinning thin meant that the yarn was weaker and far likelier to break from the weight of the spindle! If I spun a section too thin or with not enough twist, my spindle would crash to the floor and I would nervously inspect the hook - if it snaps off, I'll be in trouble!

Incorporating fewer fibers into the yarn at a time also meant that I moved through my fiber supply much more slowly than when I was spinning the thick butterscotch slubs! So spinning all of the red wool took me a little over a month. By the time I was done, I was really sick of it!

Once I finally finished spinning the red wool, I had a spindle-full that needed to be plied. Plying is where you twist the yarn together with itself in the opposite direction of how you twisted it during spinning. Plying strengthens, thickens, and balances, the yarn. With the butterscotch yarn I spun at the start of January, plying was a relatively fast process, because the yarn was thick and thus relatively short (86 yards after plying). But when I set out to ply what ended up being 426 yards of red 2-ply, I didn't realize how long it was going to take.

It took hours!!! This is what I was doing until 3 in the morning the night before going to Carleton!

Thankfully, once I'd plied it, the rest went pretty fast: I wound it out onto a chair back, measured it, washed it, and set it to dry.

This is a very round-about way of saying that, when I went to Carleton last weekend, I was really excited to come back home because I knew that by that time my yarn would have had time to dry, and I could try knitting with it!



I'd decided that I wanted to use this new yarn to knit a pair of mittens. I wanted to do a fun pattern, and I was really interested in trying entrelac, which is a neat pattern of individually-knitted rectangles in a basket-weave type pattern. So I spent a couple of days teaching myself entrelac and trying out some variations, but I ended up not being happy with it. Maybe I could have gotten it if I'd stuck longer at it.. But I decided to try something else!

Once I had a pattern, I cast on my ball of red 2-ply! How exciting!!! I was using size-2 needles.

It soon became clear, however, that size-2 was too large! So I decided to use the size-0 needles Momo gave me for Christmas. Size-0 needles are two millimeters in diameter, so not much bigger than toothpicks, and I'm really terrified of snapping them!

So for the past couple of days I've been knitting these mittens with my size-0 needles. It goes super slow because the needles are so small and the yarn is so thin, but I'm really loving it and I'm really happy with the results so far! Wish me luck!

love, Jimmy