A New Blocking Board

First off, I'm just overwhelmed by all the nice comments about Audrey and my hair cut. Both make me pretty happy. And it shouldn't have taken me so long to get to both of them either!

....

One of the things I've been struggling with lately is how to block scarves. This isn't a conceptual problem for me, but a spatial one. I just don't have that many surfaces long enough to mount something 6 foot long onto. And the ones that I do, such as beds, need to be undressed and covered in plastic to be used and to be protected from the damp.

Up until now, I'd mostly dealt with this problem simply by not blocking scarves. But then I blocked my Alpaca Silk scarf, which was short enough to block along the diagonal axis of my blocking board and saw that the result was good indeed. Thus, scarf finishing in my house was destined never to be the same again.

So I took an (html) page out of Bonne Marie's book and invested in an inexpensive carpet runner that I found on clearance at the Home Depot.

My New Mohawk Blockng Board

This particular piece of carpet is handy for a variety of reasons. First of all, it already has relatively straight lines drawn into it, giving something that a scarf edge can easily be lined up against.

Blocking the Organic Alpaca Scarf

See how nicely that works? It's also just over 7 feet long, so almost any scarf that I make (I don't think it's possible for me to knit 7 foot of anything in the same pattern without dying of boredom) will have plenty of room to stretch out and get comfortable. It's all made out of a synthetic material, so no need to worry about any bleeding from the rug, and it can easily be pinned into (although I have to admit I pinned through it into the carpet below, but that doesn't bother me too much). And finally, when I am done with it, I just need to roll it up and stash it in a corner. So there's no storage problems, either.

It can't beat my SpaceBoard in a fair fight, but it does solve my scarf blocking problem exceptionally well. And, hey, if I ever find a new solution, this rug will actually make an okay runner in my front hallway.