Scared of blocking

...mainly because I can't do it myself.

For those unfamiliar with the term, blocking is basically the treatment of a finished object -- washing (gently, depending on the material!) and shaping. For some items, this just evens out the stitches a bit, makes it look a little more polished, sharpens some stitch definitions.

For some things, like lace? Blocking can turn something that looks like a heap of soggy ramen noodles into a gorgeous work of art. (I am not joking about the ramen noodle thing. Lace looks like crap until you block it.)

If you have a ravelry login, and have not perused the "Blocking: Before and After" thread, I recommend you do so. Be warned that you can lose a lot of time on it. And your favorites and/or queue list may grow.

With that said, I have not blocked a single thing ever. Before I found rav, I didn't even know what blocking was, and I also didn't really do a lot of lace. And my post-rav projects have been the sort that could theoretically be polished by blocking but don't really need it.

But I have things that I want to make that kind of require blocking. Patterns with lace, or hats that need to be a specific shape, or colorwork (yes, blocking helps colorwork too), or ... you know. Things.

And I'm terrified about getting to the blocking stage.

Some of the problem is that I don't have a whole lot of space -- being in a wheelchair means it isn't even the slightest bit feasible to block on the floor; and my bed is a) small, b) not very flat, and c) an air mattress.

Some of the problem is that I don't have the materials. A lot of people have foam pads (particularly the jigsaw-puzzle sort that can be disassembled into smaller pieces) and rustproof T-pins and blocking wires. I don't have any of that.

Some of the problem is that it's a "never done it before" thing, and that always makes me a bit nervous, even when -- as in this case -- I have plenty of tutorials and examples to work from.

And some of the problem is that I can't do it myself. And yes, I do have PAs that can do what I tell them, but none of them are knitters and anyway I'm not really a forceful enough personality to tell people how to do something that I don't know how to do except in theory.

I'm going to have to figure some of this out. I want to. But there are too many things I need to figure out before I can block anything, and having that many obstacles makes it kind of ... scary.