The first item that showed me the magic of blocking was a lace baby blanket I made back in 2007. Blocking, for those of you unfamiliar with the term, is washing a hand-knitted (or, I suppose, crocheted) item so as to affect its final shape. It often involves stretching the item as it dries to help smooth out uneven stitches and get cleaner, neater lines. It seems to have the greatest impact when used with lace, which opens up dramatically when blocked, as it did with the baby blanket. It should be noted that blocking only works with natural fibres–synthetic fibres like acrylic cannot be persuaded to change their shape in the way that protein and cellulose can.
I’m really, really hoping blocking will do something magical for my current project. Maybe it’s due to the cotton yarn (which I rarely knit with), but its current resemblance to a mashed Yoda mask is not encouraging. Hard to see in this photo–but I promise are there–are a lot of uneven stockinette stitches. Can’t even blame it on drunken knitting, but there you go.
I’m sure blocking will help open up the blackberry stitch yoke, too. Now that I’m done with that part it’s actually coming along rather quickly–I might need to have another project ready for my trip to Montreal. Which will be something much less tedious and requiring very little attention to detail (see the aforementioned drunken knitting).
So, for those of you who work with cotton more than I do: can I expect blocking to even out my stitches in this cotton yarn?
In my (admittedly newbie) experience so far, the first run through the washing machine makes a massive difference to cotton. I’d do that and then pin out, rather than just wetting it by hand and then pinning.