Blocking Wires and Heels

I came home today to find my blocking wires here! They were packed in a giant box with a bunch of paper inside to prevent the tube of the kit from shaking around.
A tube. A very sturdy cardboard tube. You know, the kind you ship stuff in? Yeah, they packed that in a box. Surely that could have been mailed on it's own- but I digress.
It's exciting! I blocked out the shawl/scarf I made ages ago. I love it and wear it often- it's so lightweight and still very warm. Since I hadn't blocked it, it was curling up and growing longer and narrower every time I wore it.

Weaving the wires took awhile- it's 800m of yarn, after all.

I found out that I'm a very aggressive blocker. Not too surprised. I've fixed a few things in the blocking since these pictures- that bendy looking part on the one blue stripe is now not bendy, but otherwise it's sitting on my living room floor looking like this.
For reference, it's about 2 1/4 yardsticks/metersticks (they're comparable). Yup, it's gonna be a big soft fluffy piece of wonderful. I love it in the winter as a scarf and I think I'm gonna love it in the summer as a shawl. It's so light and warm and sparkley, too!
This morning on my subway/bus ride to work, I was crocheting as usual. I started in on the heel of my sock, just to see how it would go. I finished it, but even before I did I was thinking "this isn't good, this is not going to work". I finished it off and sewed it up anyway- but I left the end out.

I tried them on when I got home today, and sure enough they sucked. They only end up being 6 rows or so, which amounts to 12 when sewn up. Not enough. I guess I have big heels, or I just like room in my heels (I looked up other people's projects on Rav, and at least one person agreed with me. I felt better, and justified).
I pulled the heel out and am planning to work it differently. The method in the book called for 2 dec at either side of the row every row. I'm going to do only one per row, and I think I might work two rows even at the beginning. We'll see. A heel isn't so much work that I really mind pulling it out and working it again. At least for the first time or two, that is. Besides, I really want these socks to end up nice- they'll be comfy every day socks and the pattern is cool enough I'll enjoy showing them off.


I stopped at the library one my way home to see some artwork from one of my former college professors that was up on display. While I was there, I of course checked out the crochet book section. There were only a handful or books, of course. Maybe a 1/4 of the amount of knitting books, and only two garment books. One of them I own and one was of no interest to me.

I brought these three home to check out. These are all tip and stitch books. I've looked through them and got a few interesting ideas and picked up a tip or two I will use in future projects.

I also looked up the whole city's database for crochet books. The one that interested me most was a copy of the Vogue crochet stitchionary that's at the reference library. You can't check it out, but mostly I just want to see if it's worth buying. I do want to have one really solid book of stitch patterns.