A day in bed?

I awoke very early this morning (at least it was early for me on a Saturday). Once I'd realised that I wasn't going to go back to sleep, I got up, made a cuppa, and put Samhain to soak. That's right - I finished the knitting and darned in the ends yesterday evening. I let it soak for an hour or so, and then got to work - with the result that the living-room currently looks like this:

(also, my knees hurt). This, I think is the largest area of clear floor space in the house, and so I got to work - but even so, part of the knitting is under the sofa.

I think this was one of my longer blocking efforts - it took me about an hour of pulling; stretching; pinning and repeating. I find that it is really helpful to have guidelines to block to. I don't have 'proper' blocking mats that have a grid marked on them. Instead, I use these foam playmats that I got from Amazon for a fraction of the price. As guides, I use strips of black ribbon that I can pin where I need them for each project.

The ribbon comes from my favourite lingerie shop, Pudding - where they tie it around the boxes that they put your purchases in. The ribbon is assorted lengths and thicknesses, and over the last few years I've built up quite a collection.

I think the designer intended this shawl to be blocked as a half-hexagon. However, mine really didn't want to - so I let it do what it wanted. Instead, I have a square with a quarter cut away. I think this will really show off the lace well, and will also mean that the shawl stays on too. I blocked pretty hard to get this; I think it's just under 5' square. I was trying to strike a balance between pulling too hard and breaking something, and getting it really well blocked. The advantage of the latter is that the couple of slightly dodgy bits now don't show!

Anyway, the result of all this is that the living-room is fairly unusable at the moment. I need to wait for the shawl to dry, and given that towards the end I was spraying to re-dampen (old cleaning spray bottle filled with the water/ euclan that I had originally used for soaking the shawl pre-blocking) it's going to take a while. And so for now, I'm going to go and find a cup of coffee and then spend the morning in bed with the new knitting .....

(A gratuitous unblocked picture of the shawl, modelled by Hermione.)