mitten blocking, take 1

The joy of working from home is that I can decide on a whim to throw something in a nice Eucalan bath, and then pin it out during lunch.

I thought it would be nice to see how blocking the first mitten goes, before starting to block the second, which is still in progress. Well, that, and I was impatient. After seeing how much more relaxed and even the stitches looked after a good soaking, I decided to just do a plain old pinning out for blocking, instead of something fancy, like stuffing it with a plastic bag of crumpled newspaper.



As you can see, I pinned it out palm up. I would have preferred to pin it out with the top facing up, as I'm more concerned with how that looks than with how the palm looks. However, since humans are built with thumbs that bend in under, not over our hands, and since mittens are designed to fit these hands, I pinned it out upside down. That way I could also attempt to pin the thumb out, to add a little length to it. So it should be a surprise (hopefully a nice one) when I unpin it tomorrow. I did stretch it a bit widthwise, so hopefully that will erase any puckering, even if I can't see it until I unpin it.

So do I wait until it's dry and unpinned to see if it works, and then block out the second one? That would be the responsible thing to do, but since the palm of the mitten looks so nice and even right now, I'm going to assume the top does, too, and will probably pin the second mitten out tonight. That way I have one day less to wait for a finished pair.