The Importance of Blocking

I have a delightful mother-in-law.  She loves snow, snowpeople, Christmas, and winter merriment in general.  Since she is lovely and also birthed the most wonderful human I know, I made her fancypants mittens for Christmas.

Before admiring, let's take a moment to note how important blocking is.*

Here is a picture of the mittens straight off the needles.

You'll note that they look kind of wadded up.  That's because they had spent their entire existence up to this point either wadded up in my knitting bag or wadded up in my hands. 

I soaked them for awhile in cold water and Soak to give the wool time to relax.  Then I used my extremely expensive mitten blockers* to stretch them to the shape I wanted.

After they dried, they looked like this:

and the backs looked like this:

I love them and am really pleased with the way they turned out.  Here's hoping my mother-in-law loves them as well.

*If you don't know what I'm talking about, click here.

**Also known as "bits of an amazon box cut up and wrapped with plastic grocery bags."