since bobbi (expert knitter; friend; project manager of this sweater) has instilled the fear of god in me if i don’t PROPERLY gauge my new sweater, i’m going the full nine in terms of prep work. in addition to blocking my swatch, i also thought that i should do something about the color-fastness of my dark navy yarn, which will be striped with my much-lighter camel colored yarn. (this sweater turning into a muddled colored blog is probably actually a bigger concern of mine than this stupid swatch.)



after some brief internet research, i amassed my materials.
* 1/4 cup of salt
* 1/2 cup of vinegar
* 4 cups of hot water
* bowl

first, you need to be working with a skein of yarn…not a ball or this won’t work (a ball is too tight). luckily for me, knit picks packaged this one up already as a skein. also, don’t do this with wool! only with cotton. apparently the hot water will cause the wool to felt.



then i dissolved the salt & vinegar in the hot water, put in my skein of cotton in, soaked for 20 minutes, rinsed. then because i didn’t want to smell like a bag of salt & vinegar potato chips, i quickly gave it a soak in wool-lite, and a final rinse. then set it out to dry. honestly, this literally took me 5 minutes to put together…and after seeing almost no color come out of this dark blue yarn, i’m feeling pretty reassured.




while all of this was going on, i also blocked my swatch. before that, i took crazy measurements of the pre-blocked swatch and got my pre-blocked gauge. then soaked it a bit hear in some wool-lite, rinsed it out and pinned it out with some T-pins. i’m so proud of myself for being so thorough and not cheating my way through this sweater!