Yikes! I haven’t writ­ten for over a month! I don’t think that that’s ever hap­pened since I start­ed this blog in 2010! Oh man. It’s been very, very busy with school and work, just get­ting a bit of breath­ing space after fin­ish­ing a mid-term paper today… And! We North Amer­i­cans get an extra hour thanks to day­light sav­ing! So guess what I did with that extra hour?

Block­ing! :D

The real­ly nice folks at Yarn Cana­da sent me a cou­ple of cakes of Red Heart It’s a Wrap quite a while ago to try out and review, and I recent found a per­fect pat­tern for it — it calls for a thread/lace weight cot­ton, it’s a rel­a­tive­ly quick project, and it’s some­thing that I think my BFF will real­ly like…

A ghost­ly doily! :O

I like to call it the Casper-go-round — it’s got the per­fect Casper head-shape!

My BFF loves all things Hal­loween, so I’m think­ing she will enjoy this even when it’s not Hal­loween. (and she does­n’t read my blog, so she won’t know this is com­ing her way. shhh.) This bril­liant (free!) pat­tern is called “Boo” by Mar­sha Glass­ner on Rav­el­ry. The pat­tern calls for a lighter thread, but for the Red Heart yarn I used a 2.5 mm hook.

With 50/50 cot­ton and acrylic con­tent, the yarn was smooth and soft to work with and has great drape. While I’m try­ing my hands on it with the doily I’m think­ing it would be great for a garment.

It has excep­tion­al yardage — 1100 yards per cake (for under $12 CAD!). I used less than half of the cen­tre beige sec­tion for a 13″ doily, with the “West­ern” colour­way because I’m par­tial to mut­ed colours, but the yarn also offers oth­er colour com­bi­na­tions that are more bright and cheer­ful. It would be great for shawls, cardi­gans, even a tod­dler’s dress, with all that yardage!

Because it is a lace pat­tern it was nec­es­sary to block, which I’m not too famil­iar with. But I did get some tips from a knit­ting cir­cle I was a part of in the sum­mer, so I gave that a try, and I thought it would also be a good way to test out a dif­fer­ent aspect of the yarn for this review. 

So first, I soaked a hand tow­el and wrung out the excess water. Then I rolled the doily in the tow­el and added more water to it, then care­ful­ly pressed the excess water out (but care­ful not to wring, I was told). Then I laid the doily on a fold­ed large tow­el (the plushi­est I have, because I don’t have block­ing mats), and stretched and pinned it to shape.

It only took sev­er­al hours to dry. Because of the cot­ton con­tent of the yarn, it most­ly held its shape after unpin­ning. It did start to spring back a tiny bit, I guess because of its acrylic con­tent (or maybe I was stretch­ing it too much), but I think for this pat­tern it’s fine for it to shape-shift a lit­tle :) I was think­ing if it con­tin­ues to lose shape I can also press it with an iron under a tow­el, which I had done with acrylics before. 

Per­fect under­neath a can­dy dish! Stay Puft would be proud :D

With the rest of the yarn I’m going to start on a cro­chet pullover pat­tern that I’ve been eye­ing for a long time. It’s going to take a while… but will sure­ly share when it’s done!

Be sure to check out Yarn Cana­da’s huge selec­tions of yarn, I always think it’s pret­ty incred­i­ble that they offer free ship­ping on orders over $45 or flat rate of $5 (with­in Cana­da). It’s also pret­ty con­ve­nient when I have such short­age of time these days… too convenient…

Hap­py November!

 

*Dis­claimer: I received prod­uct from Yarn Cana­da to write a review of the prod­uct; the opin­ions expressed on this blog are entire­ly my own.