Unripened Hanami, Nearly Ripe

I’m so excited.

My Knit Picks blocking wires arrived today.

I promptly dunked my Hanami stole into a vat of water, drained it and began threading the wires in.

It wasn’t as easy as I had imagined, but still way WAY easier than trying to stretch out this stole with pins alone. Hooray for whoever thought of blocking wires the first time!

Anyhoo, it took me some time, two glasses of wine, and a crick in my back, but the stole is finally blocking. (Don’t look too closely if you’re a perfectionist).

Strangely enough, although I used the same yarn and needles as the designer, I seem to have ended up with a stole that is about a foot shorter than it’s supposed to be. Maybe I was too cautious in the blocking, but when the yarn is extremely taut and making an ominous creaking noise, I have to stop tugging. Call me cowardly, but there you have it. (Maybe if I didn’t have people who needed things like ‘dinner’ and ‘bedtime stories’ kicking around, I could have stretched it out when it was still sopping wet and not re-sprayed-wet and it’d have gone further. Or maybe not. I have not found the Knit Picks Alpaca Cloud to be very stretchy in the past).

So here we have it, blocking on some mats I originally bought for gymnastic toddlers: