A little over a month ago, I wrote a post about blocking acrylic yarn, and how I only do it when necessary because I don’t actually like blocking. While blocking cotton yarn seems less risky, I don’t like it any more than blocking acrylic. Unfortunately, I have recently reached the point in Sophie’s Universe where blocking is more critical, and simultaneously completed hot pads that didn’t turn out exactly square. Both of these projects were completed with cotton yarn, so it seemed like wet blocking was the way to go.

For any blocking projects, I’ve used the following supplies:

Since cotton yarn can get wet and then hold its shape after it dries, the most common blocking method (as far as I’ve found) is wet blocking, where you fully submerge the item in water and then lay it out to dry. Sounds simple, right? In theory, yes. When you’re overly particular about laying things out perfectly, maybe not.

The hot pads, while being small in size, were very manageable and relatively simple. After submerging in water, I laid them out to dry on the blocking boards and shaped them into place. Then, after letting them dry overnight and and most of the next day, they were dry and ready to use!

Blocking Sophie was a different story. Since my blocking boards were not big enough, I laid beach towels down on the floor in an area that was out of the way. Once the area was set up, I submerged Sophie in cold water, and then carefully squeezed the excess water out. When you’re wet blocking, you need to be gentle while squeezing the water out, and shouldn’t ring it to get out as much as possible. Sophie was still pretty wet when I started to lay it out, and that was just fine. After crawling around on my knees until they were damp from rearranging the blanket on the towels, I finally managed to find a method that worked well.

Most of the methods that didn’t work involved trying to quickly move and drop the blanket, hoping it would land and look even. Since Sophie was pretty wet, it was not going to naturally go to the way I was hoping it would. This should have been obvious, because that’s the whole reason for blocking it, but with such a large piece, I was hoping for good luck while struggling with getting it to look right laid out.

Finally, the method that I found to work best was to lay it out flat (ignoring the problems) and then slowly roll in one side at a time, until the whole thing was rolled up into a little ball and I could focus on pieces at a time, moving my hand underneath the blanket to reform as I unrolled it. The photos below show the process of unrolling.

I finished laying Sophie out to dry in the evening, and left her there until two days later when I was home from work. While it probably didn’t need the full 48 hours of drying time, it did feel just the slightest bit damp at 24 hours. All in all, the wet blocking was a success, despite the additional patience required.

Sophie is as beautiful as ever at the end of round seven, and I can’t wait to finish and show you the full Sophie’s Universe!