It’s so much easier getting my samples evenly blocked since I made a blocking mat with a grid. I had an ancient foam backed mat that had a brilliant reflective, iron-proof top layer that I couldn’t use any more because the foam was disintegrating into dust. The cloth top layer has a really useful 1″ grid printed on it (yes it’s that old!). So I took it into the garden and shaved the old foam lumps off, then scrubbed the back to remove all the glue residue and it came up great. Next I mounted the original cloth cover onto a modern firm foam camping mat. It works brilliantly, the grid and reflective surface survived perfectly. 

So now I’m using it to block some  knit samples for my new book due to come out next summer.