Stretch, Shape and Sculpt

With a title like that, you may think this article is going to be about exercise rather than knitting and fiber arts, but you would be wrong. Instead the flexibility of our bodies, let's look at blocking and the flexibility of wool, especially as it pertains to hand knit lace.

I decided to re-block my Chasing Butterflies Shawl after seeing one of my friends wearing her shawl recently. We initially took very different approaches to blocking our finished pieces. I did a relatively gentle shaping with lots of T-pins to open up the points along the edging. She was much more aggressive with the blocking and used blocking wires to really open things up.