Blocking a Block

Sometimes observing what you're doing changes what you're doing. And so it is with a blog. If I weren't blogging about knitting, I would probably crank on with Viola until I had all the squares knitted. Boring, boring, boring, but progress. There can't be that many people cheering just to see the scorecard total going up day after day. Progress, but boring. I've done a lot of squares, but am not even to the halfway mark yet. How long till both the readers of this blog are sound asleep?

Am I getting bored knitting all these squares? Surprisingly, not really. A lot of Netflix is getting watched, but the squares are different enough from each other to keep me wide awake--changing from bias to miter to straight and all different patterns of color now that the plain squares are done.

Still...the part of me that sometimes checks the last pages of a novel before I've naturally got there wants to see how hairy putting all these guys together is going to be. And will it really look like the picture? There's a practical aspect, too. Won't it be a huge headache to sort out 206 squares into the right pattern if I wait till the very end? Much easier to assemble sections of the whole first and then put those together. See? All rationalized.

So I picked out the squares from the first page of the charts and organized them as given on the page:

Now all those labels have to come off as the squares go in the water, but even if they get all muddled, it can't be that hard to sort out only 12. Into the sink they go:

And out into a towel to be gently squozen out:

Then for the blockage! I am really glad I have this gridded blocking board for the task. Immersion, yarn bloom, and natural garter stitch stretchiness has made them bigger than when I originally knit and measured them. So instead of stretching, as happens with blocking lace, a whole lot of smooshing is going on to get them within their 4x4 borders and all squared up instead of diamonded, as the biases and miters are wont to do on their own.

Ta daaaaaa------

Next chapter: the stitching and the burying of 1,000,000 ends!