Like everyone else, I have fallen in love with the French Press Felted Slippers.  Word is the Yarn Harlot’s mention caused technical issues over at French Press Knits!  There’s apparently a slipper knitting revolution in the works.  ‘Tis the season.

I used 2 skeins Plymouth Galway Worsted in bright red and the requisite size 15 needles.  Galway is great because it’s inexpensive, comes in a decent color range, and felts like a dream.  What more can you ask for in your felting wool?  These slippers are very easy to knit and the directions are great.  I initially thought that since they are constructed in multiples pieces that they would be fiddley, but they aren’t.  The assembly really is a snap and it only took maybe a half hour to sew everything together.

I chose some brown leather buttons because I love brown and red together and I liked how the buttons looked on the slippers - yeah I know, it’s a highly evolved system I have for making decisions.  Sewing on the tabs and the buttons wasn’t much harder than seaming things before felting, but I recommend you have a thimble or something because pushing a needle into the felt isn’t the easiest thing on your fingers.  I used embroidery floss and a large eye needle and it worked great.

The slippers fit well (and isn’t that just the very best part of felting your own slippers?) and I really like the puff paint on the soles.  It’s so much easier than sewing the leather onto the bottom.  However, I found that they’ve stretched quite a bit and the paint is coming off in places.  I wear my slippers all the time and I think this style doesn’t hold up as well to strenuous wear as the felted clogs, but darn they’re cute!  I’m going to try to wash them again and see if I can get them to shrink back down to the size my skinny feet need and then I’ll reapply the puff paint.

I still need to finish the oatmeal colored version of these slippers for my grandmother, but that’s on the agenda for this weekend.  I’ll have pictures of her little tiny ones (I had to felt them down to a size 4!) as soon as I’m finished with them.  I think these will work much better for her arthritic feet than the felted clogs I made her last year, but we’ll see on Christmas Eve.

Happy Friday and good luck with all of your last minute Christmas tasks.

I was cruising Ravelry the other day looking for a slipper pattern to make for my grandmother for Christmas.  I made her a pair of Fiber Trends felted clogs for Christmas last year, but her arthritis is so bad that she can’t get her feet into the clogs.  She loved that I had made her slippers and was disappointed that she couldn’t get them on so I decided to try to find a different pattern for her.  She is in a wheelchair most of the time these days, and her feet hurt her a lot.  She has a functional, but not very pretty, pair of slippers that she wears most of the time, but I thought she needed a fashionable and comfortable pair!  Enter the French Press Felted Slippers.  They’re fashionable and feminine and you could put some really cute girly buttons on them!  Grandma Toots will love them (I hope!).  I didn’t look any further and bought the pattern - I love that about Ravelry.

For her, I’m thinking a cream tweed.  Originally I thought pink because she loves pink, but cream will go with more things, and the tweed keeps them from looking filthy the first moment you actually put them on your feet (the ones I made her last year were cream at her request).  This is what I decided on…

Just the other day I bought myself some yarn to make a new pair of felted clogs because mine have seen better days.  I suppose getting 2 years out of a pair of slippers when you wear them every single day (even in the summer) isn’t too bad!

Now that I’ve seen the French Press pattern, I can’t decide if I want to make myself another pair of clogs or a pair of the ballet flats.  I suppose I could make both, but my time is pretty limited this month so I’d rather choose one now and then knit the other pair later (after Christmas gifts and quilting are finished).  I bought this yarn - brown heather and teal for the clogs,

but I’m thinking red for the ballet flats.

Which do you think I should make first?

The Curiously Clever Clog and I had a little heart to heart and we decided that the pattern shouldn’t be as hard as it is. I ripped out what I had and bought the updated Fiber Trends clog pattern. I started the new clogs at about 6 o’clock Saturday night and finished the second one this morning. I love felting!

The construction of these is soooo much simpler than the Stitch Diva pattern. It’s basically a sole and a top constructed with short rows. Then you go back and knit a second sole and bind the two soles off together to attach them. There’s a seam down the center of each sole and that’s it!

The reason I went with the Stitch Diva pattern to start with is that I have narrow feet and I have a hard time with things like clogs. The Stitch Diva pattern looked narrower with a more streamlined fit. However, Fiber Trends has revised their clog pattern. It’s “updated with a narrower fit while still including information on adding width if needed.” And it is perfect!

The felted fabric is very firm and I felted the clogs enough so that they are narrow enough for my skinny feet. I ordered the Fiber Trends two-piece slipper bottoms in charcoal. I hope they work on the bottom of the slippers to provide a little non-skid action without ruining the overall look of the clog. I’ll let you know how they work as soon as I get them.

Happy Monday.

I finished the hood on Rogue yesterday while I was at the yarn store.

Pumpkin Mama gave me her directions for grafting the cables and it was very helpful. The process was much simpler with those directions!

So now I just have two sleeves and I’ll be done. I wonder how long those two sleeves will take me. Last night I didn’t feel like knitting on the first sleeve (you see why I’m worried about how long the sleeves will take?), so I dug to the bottom of the WIP basket for the Curiously Clever Clogs. It’s getting cold here and I need some new slippers. I remember now why I stopped working on these. I got to the point where I’m supposed to attach the outer sole to the main slipper body.

Sounds simple right? Well, I’m having a really hard time figuring it out. I did a google search on this pattern and the only blog I can find with a completed pair is Indigo Muse. I e-mailed her to see if she can help me interpret the directions, but haven’t heard back. If any of you are familiar with the pattern, I’d love some insight. Anyway, for now I think I’ll go back to the Rogue sleeve and maybe just look for a new clog pattern. The thing I like about this pattern is the more streamlined style, but I guess I could knit one to figure it out and then rip it out and redo it. Although that doesn’t really sound that fun.

Saturday was my mom’s birthday and sometime after Carole’s post on her felted bag I decided to try to line my mom’s Noni bag for her as a surprise birthday gift. She’s been talking a lot about how she wants to use it and since it was her very first knitted project, I thought it would be a nice surprise (plus I’d get to practice my lining skills on a much smaller bag - two birds and all that). The surprise was aided by the fact my mom was out of town. The bad news was I had to find the bag, the handles and hardware, and the fabric in her house on my own. It was kind of comical. I found the bag and the fabric together within the first 5 minutes of my search. The hardware was another matter. I ended up taking everything out of one of her closets (vacuum, sewing machine, winter boots - everything), everything out of the baskets in her craft room/library, and I finally found what I was looking for in a bag next to her couch upstairs in her tv room. By that time I was freaking out because I didn’t have a back-up birthday gift and I was sure I wasn’t going to be able to find the materials I needed. But in the end it worked out. Thank goodness.

Saturday morning I sat down with the fabric, my stash of timtex and interfacing, the purse, and the hardware to develop a plan. It took me a little while to figure out what I needed to do - measuring, figuring, panicking - the works. Eventually I worked up the nerve to cut the fabric and the interfacing.

After I got the lining pieced attached to the interfacing (I’d forgotten how much a pain sewing with timtex is - gawd that stuff is stiff), I sewed all the lining pieces together. Because of the shape of the bag, I ended up using two side pieces and a bottom rather than making end pieces and side pieced. The bag is pretty much a barrel shape, so I just put a seam on each end. After I got it together I put it into the felted bag to check the fit.

The sides of the bag go in slightly and I didn’t take that into account when I made the lining. I ended up just angling the sides - I took it in an inch at the top of both sides and angled the seam so it would meet the existing seams at the bottom. It ended up working just fine and that way I didn’t have to use the seam ripper (bonus!). The final step for the lining was to turn the top under and finish it.

In a traditional bag you would just put the right side of the lining together with the right side of the outside (with the handles in between the two pieces) and sew them together and then turn everything right side out. But, because of the thickness of the felt and the fact that I didn’t want to lose any of the felt to a seam, I finished the lining and then attached the finished lining to the felted bag.

The final step before putting everything together was to make the tabs for the handles and attach them to the lining.

I made the tabs as suggested by the Noni website and then measured and attached them to the lining. After that was all done all that was left was to sew the lining to the felted bag. I had planned to sew it on my machine, but the combination was too thick so it had to be done by hand. I was glad I had a movie to watch because it took me most of the movie to get the lining attached. All in all it took me about 7 hours to complete this project (and my mom is, of course, worth it). The good news is that the finished bag turned out really cute.

My mom was really surprised and she loved it. She went right home and put all her stuff in it and she says she’s gotten lots of compliments on it in the last couple of days. So, I would say it was a good birthday gift and now I can try to do my bag. In case you’re curious, the pattern she used is the same I used for my huge bag. Hers is the Smallish Carpet Baguette and mine is the Rather Huge Carpet Bag (both from the Fall 2005 Collection).