Welcome To Soak School
Blocking Knits
A crucial step in your hand-knit creations
Blocking knits is an important step that is often missed because knitters aren't sure what it is, what the value is, and how to do it. Let’s answer the first question:
What is blocking?
“Blocking is the process of wetting or steaming your final pieces of knitting to set the finished size and even out the stitches.”-Cocoknits
Blocking your knits with Soak will ensure your hand knits look their best and keep your fibers fresh with our eco-friendly no-rinse wash.
How to Block your knits
1. Prep work
Finish your Soakworthy™ hand knitted object.
2. Soak
Fill a basin or sink with lukewarm water. Add Soak in your favorite scent, or scentless for your sensitive side. Place knit garment in water and let it soak for 15 minutes, ensuring it is fully saturated and surrounded by water.
3. Block & Dry
Gently squeeze excess water out of item, without wringing or twisting the fibres. Place item on a dry towel and line up any striping, cables or lines to keep them straight.Roll towel with item inside to squeeze out any extra moisture. Use a drying rack or anywhere that allows airflow on both sides of the item, and adjust the item to how it should look when it’s dry. Allow item to dry overnight.
4. Love it. Wear it.
Once fibers are completely dry, the knit design should be the proper size and lie flat when worn. Enjoy your newly handmade, totally Soakworthy™ garment!
Image above: Kelbourne Woolens
Pro tips
→If your yarn is hand dyed, don’t be surprised if there is some over dye in the water during the soaking process
→If you are blocking a larger item, you don’t want to lift up the weight of the water in the garment. It will stretch and distort the fibers. Be sure to support the weight of the garment with both hands as you remove it from the water.
→For intricate details like lace, lay garment flat on a drying surface like foam and manually adjust design to finished garment measurements and use straight pins to keep item in place. For accuracy, use a ruler to ensure all design elements are the same width and length.
→Continue to hand wash your knit items with Soak to keep the delicate fibers looking their best.
Image above: Kelbourne Woolens
Looking for more blocking tips?
Soak is the wash of choice at Modern Daily Knitting! Check out this amazing blocking tutorial on Modern Daily Knitting, featuring Soak.
We’re so excited that MDK and Jillian Moreno (a long time Soak fan) chose to incorporate Soak into their blog post on wet blocking. It’s an amazing feeling, to see Soak through someone else’s eyes (and yarn). Whether on a knit demo like here, on a quilting blog, via social or a lingerie care video, it’s our greatest pleasure to share tips and tricks with you, our most trusted customers.
If you aren’t on the MDK newsletter train, we suggest you hop on. They feed up daily doses of knitting related magic. And if you haven’t seen this specific post yet, check out the link below for the full article. If you are a knitter, or curious about why blocking (and Soaking, frankly) your knits on the regular is important it’s a great read.
Many thanks to Jullian Moreno and Modern Daily Knitting for sharing this project using Soak!