No complaints.

Since the whole family was going away last weekend, I had an opportunity to block the Peacock Shawl. I had just read Stephanie's discussion of how she blocks, and I do pretty much the same for shawls (I'm a little more casual about sweaters). But the idea of a string along the straight edge struck me as genius.

In retrospect, choosing string that wouldn't break would be even more brilliant. And no configuration of pins would give me much tension, so I was sort of tying the ends to parts of the bedframe. (I block on my daughter Eva's bed. Can't use mine; the cat sleeps there. Of the girls' beds, Eva's is preferable, because it's the lower bunk. But either bunk is a little small for the job.)

Also, I think I must once have owned some straight pins (doesn't everyone? Besides, I took Home Ec in 8th grade). But I can't find them now. So I had one lollipop-head blocking pin, and a ridiculous-but-just-short-of-adequate number of safety pins from the drycleaner. Consequently, I was only able to use a pin in about every alternate loop of the bindoff. Annoying result:

Well, I can always re-block someday. The bigger picture:

I needn't have worried about the size; it's at least 70-some inches wide by more than 40" deep. (I should measure it. But insofar as Eva's bed is about 39" wide and +/- 72" long, it's bigger than that.) For scale:

In these pictures, the pattern doesn't look much airier or clearer than it did in the unblocked photos. But in person it seems more open, and also much crisper, in hand as well as in pattern definition.

Now, if we could just get a break in the weather.