Good evening! I meant to get this posted this morning, but things don’t always go the way we plan. I hope this post is worth the wait!
One thing I like about crochet is that if you’re doing a small project it can go by pretty fast. I’m currently working on a whole mess of holiday decorations that I’m going to be putting to good use later this year, mostly with Crochet. I originally started down this path last year when I wanted to get some gifts for family and friends but found myself low on time and cash. I went digging into my yarn stash for odds and ends of yarn I had left over from older projects and with a quick google search got around to whipping up some cute little crocheted ornaments. Now I’ve decided to try and be proactive so I am no longer waiting to the last minute to try and make snowflakes, Christmas trees and Christmas presents.
It’s amazing how much more relaxing things are when you’re not rushing on a one week deadline to make two dozen different pieces. Now that I’ve gotten my pieces all mostly made and the tails woven in on them comes the hard part, blocking them to lie flat. Since the pieces were small and all made out of acrylic yarn, I figured I would take a stab at a new blocking technique I’ve never done before: steam blocking.
As the name suggests steam blocking is what you do when you use an iron (or steaming machine) to heat the bejeezus out of an acrylic yarn piece, saturating it with hot steam to manipulate the acrylic fibers. You don’t actually use the iron on the pieces, just the steam coming from the iron, but I was nervous before trying it.
The first thing I did for steam blocking was lay out my blocking boards and then lay an old towel over it – the blocking board gave a secure location to pin my pieces to, and the towel protected the board from being affected by the steam. After getting that all set up I used my t-pins to hold the pieces flat and in the shape I wanted them to be at. As a bonus, the t pins also gave me a little height that I could use to make sure I wasn’t accidentally getting the iron too close to the yarn. Next, I filled up my iron (well, my mother’s iron) and set it to the highest steam setting.
As someone who has used an iron maybe three times in her life all I could think of was an old episode of “I Love Lucy”. In it the wives and husbands switched jobs for the day and the husbands burned all their wives shirts with an iron. My trepidation was high as I braced myself to take an iron to my crochet (figuratively, as stated before the iron did not actually touch the crochet).
I spent a good half an hour slowly steaming the pieces, hovering the iron over the yarn some 20-30 seconds and did two passes in order to make sure the pieces were fully blocked. While I wouldn’t say the pieces were “perfectly” blocked they were much flatter than they had started out. Since I’ll be making a garland out of them I’m not too worried about them laying completely flat but I do want them to not curl up.
After the pieces were dry to the touch I pulled up the pins, checked how the pieces were blocked, and then cleaned up my supplies. While the process is not as frightening as I expected it to be it does take more time than simply pinning a piece out on a board to dry into the desired shape since you have to be handling the iron and keeping an eye out so that you don’t accidentally damage the piece you have made. I will definitely do steam blocking again if I need to but it likely won’t be my go to choice.
I’ll put up a picture of the pieces once they’ve been made into actual garlands but for now my much flatter pieces are waiting to be put together.
