Soooo, I was knitting a weirdly shaped cardigan–kind of a shrug-with-sleeves, knitted all-in-one–and wondering how to block it.
(Blocking is the act of pulling wool to shape during the drying process)
Because it’s not a flat piece, it’s a puzzle to block. I saw a pciture where people had pinned out the body and then stuffed the sleeves with bubble wrap or rolled towels so that they stood up at 90 degrees to the pinned out flat body peices.
But that looked like it was going to take a long time to dry.
And my man had just bought a 3D printer and said to me “If you can think of anything practical you’d like printed…”
Now I had something I wanted: a mesh column I could insert inside my sleeves to block my Hitofude cardigan!
Finding The Design
A quick trawl of Thingiverse (I can’t remember what search term I used. Maybe “column” and “lattice”?) came up with a bunch of coffee cup sleeves that looked like they’d do the job.
A few measurements and adjustments, one sub-optimal prototype (and 30 hrs of combined printing time for the design we settled on) and lo! I had sleeve blockers.
Much more robust than the first design we tried.
Here’s how it looked when it was all pinned out.
Measurements & Materials We Used
I measured around my upper arm and then pulled the tape measure tight, because I didn’t want to make a blockers that would make baggy sleeves (so there is negative ease).
I measured my arm above the elbow. I measured the distance in between the two.
We ended up with a smaller diameter of 80mm and an upper of 100mm, and a length of 200mm. I probably could have stood it being a couple of centimeters longer. (That would have been all our machine could handle!)
We used this PLA for the green one and this PLA for the red one (The Maker was experimenting with different materials). Both seem sturdy. The green feels a little heftier.
We used this machine (pro version). The Maker commented that this was no small deal to construct, but he had a great time and learned a lot about the machine while putting it together.
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Going Forward
I’m thinking these would be useful for blocking hand-knitted sweaters after a wash too, (especially if the sweater has stranded or lace work that continues over the sleeves that deserves to be shown off properly.)
Because of the limitations of our machine we can only make these about 22cm long. For a long-sleeved top, then, I could just use 2 blockers (of different sizes) for each upper and forearm section.
Final Thoughts
I’ll report back once the sweater has dried. I suspect I should have made the diameter bigger, but we’ll see…
Final-final thoughts
even for these short sleeves I could have done with these frames being longer as the fabric “pooled” a little around the place where sleeve met body, and maybe they could have been wider, to fully block the lace pattern but certainly a worthy effort.
what do you think?
