The Fraught & Frustrating Felted Slippers

 

In the spring of 2023, when I was putting away my winter footwear and getting out my summer sandals and flip flops, I discovered that there were holes in the soles of the much-worn felted slippers that I had made in late 2016. I sighed and added "new slippers for me" to my already overly long list of 2023 knitting projects, deciding also to prioritize them and get them done by October, as they were something I actually needed. 

I did an extensive search of slipper patterns on Ravelry, and ended up deciding that the French Press Felted Slippers, by Melynda Bernardi, which I had used to make my previous pair of slippers, was still the pattern I liked best and that I was just going to make myself a new pair. I'd already purchased the pattern, it is a design with a certain amount of style (that is, as much as one could expect from a pair of woolly slippers), and my first pair had both kept my feet warm as toast and lasted for over six years. I could hardly do better than that. 

But I could do better in terms of colour choice. I had liked my old slippers, but had always regretted making them in a khaki green. In winter, I wear dark brown yoga pants (I own five pairs of them), or olive green khakis or corduroys around the house, and the old pair had really only gone with the latter.  In August 2023, I visited Romni Wools, looking for a dark brown worsted yarn that would go with all my around-home trousers. They didn't have anything in just the right shade in a worsted, but in their bargain basement I found some bulky-weight Linie 231 Filz-Wolle in 12 Chocolate Brown that I thought would do -- I would just have to felt the yarn more to get it down to the right size. Knowing I would probably need more of a heavier gauge weight yarn than the 150 grams of worsted the pattern specified, I bought four 50 gram skeins of yarn to be on the safe side.

When I began knitting the slippers, it soon became clear that 200 grams of yarn I had weren't going to cut it. I had to go back to Romni and get two more skeins -- I think they only had three left. When I was finished knitting the slippers, I realized that I should have made the soles with three strands of yarn instead of only two. But this was a mistake I didn't bother to correct, as I wouldn't have had sufficient yarn for it, even if I did go back to Romni and get that one remaining skein -- assuming it was even still there. The two-strand sole was pretty thick as it was anyway, given the yarn I'd used, not to mention of a comically large size. It was a relief to have finished the knitting, as I don't like big needle knits. 

Then came the felting process, another thing I don't enjoy. I have a front loading washing machine with a Fort Knox-like auto locking system, so I thought I couldn't use my washing machine to felt things, but must do it manually. The last time I made these slippers, it took me five and a half hours to felt them. This time I did some reading up and watching of YouTube videos on felting in advance. I started out using hot water in a cooking pot as the YouTube felter had done, thinking I could at least sit down during the process, but I didn't like that I had to keep refreshing the water as it cooled. I ended up going back to the method I'd resorted to for my last slippers: I agitated the slippers in a large pot of water which I kept simmering on the stove, occasionally rinsing them in cold water at the sink to shock the felt into shrinking. This time it took me a gruelling four hours and twenty minutes, during which I endured frequent splashes of  hot water (it wasn't hot enough to burn me, but it was hot enough to sting), but I thought was at least an improvement on the last time, and this time around I'd also done more felting in less time because the slippers had been larger to start with. My hands ached so much afterwards that I had to get up in the middle of the night and take ibuprofen, and it took me four or five days to get the brown stains off my fingernails, but it was a relief to think that the felting process was done and I wouldn't have to do it again for years.

With the slippers ready to assemble, I took one of the straps with me to Fabricland to buy buttons for them. It was a pleasant and easy task, I was in the home stretch of finishing slippers I really needed but that I hadn't enjoyed making and then... I lost the felted strap somewhere in the store, and simply could not find it again. And hoo boy, did I look. I must have spent well over an hour looking for it. I retraced my steps through the stores repeatedly. I emptied out and went through the contents of my shoulder bag and the one shopping bag I had with me three separate times. I went through my coat pockets, even taking off my jacket and shaking it in case the strap had slipped down one of my sleeves or something. I told the staff I'd dropped it and they looked for it themselves with a commendable thoroughness and zeal. One young store employee even got down on her hands and knees and crawled around in the yarn area, where I'd been browsing, looking for it. But all of our efforts were for naught. We couldn't find the damn strap. Finally, too tired to look anymore, I gave up, purchased the buttons that had matched the strap while I had it, left my name and contact information with the store staff in the forlorn hope that the strap might yet turn up, and dragged myself home. I waited a few days, and when I didn't hear from Fabricland, I resigned myself to the inevitable, and made a new strap.

At least I had enough yarn left over, and it took me less than fifteen minutes to knit a new strap and darn in the ends. Then came the felting part, which took about an hour, but then I hit yet another snag in the process when I realized the new strap and the remaining original strap were two very different shades of brown. I ended up stewing the slippers and the straps in a pot on the stove for five or six hours, which almost corrected the colour of the new strap. There was still a slight shading difference between the straps, but by that point I was too fed up with the whole process to care.   

The completed slippers in a size 8. (The colours didn't photograph that well, and the buttons actually go better with the yarn than one would think given their appearance in this photo.) After all the trouble I had with them, I'm reasonably pleased with them. But I think next time I make these slippers I will go with a worsted. These fit well, but they are a lot bulkier than my old slippers. 

I do have a few thoughts on how to make the felting process easier on me next time. First of all, I am going to experiment with using my washing machine to felt whatever material I'm working with, because I've discovered that I can work around the machine's auto lock by unplugging the machine whenever I want to check on or remove the items, as long as I don't let the machine go into spin cycle. If machine felting doesn't work for me, I will use the deep stock pot I recently bought from a thrift shop for the manual felting process, which should prevent or at least reduce the painful splashing. And lastly, in future I vow to be VERY careful with my samples when shopping for notions, especially if the sample is actually a piece of a project. 

This project was made from newly purchased yarn and I had just 20 grams of yarn left when it was completed, or a stash increase of 20 grams.

The Cat on the Back

Last year I tried to use up some green wool DK I had on hand by knitting it into a pullover with some new yarn I'd bought for the purpose. It turned out that the yarn refused to spring back -- nothing I did to the finished sweater fixed the rumpled and rutted look of its green stockinette. I used the second yarn I had bought to make two new projects this year, and with that done, it was time to see what could be done with the green. I thought I could felt with it. I didn't even have to use the Ravelry project database to pick out a pattern, as I immediately thought of one that I had on hand.

This is the Panda Backpack, designed by Linda Cyr. It appeared in a nineties-era issue of Family Circle Knitting, which I had in my knitting library. And how cute is it? I thought it would be the perfect thing to make for my friend's toddler, my honorary niece Olivia. I found some teal yarn (actually, small amounts of several very similar types of teal yarn) to accent the green, and some cream yarn to go with them both. But rather than putting a panda on the bag's pocket, I decided to put a cat on it. Olivia is cat-fixated. Her first word was "cat", and she gets very excited whenever she sees a cat anything in a store. And hey, why not feed her obsession, since that's the kind of aunt I am? For the cat image, I used the graph from The Cat's Out of the Bag felted tote bag pattern, designed by Deborah Tomasello.

Here's the finished bag. I ran into a few snags during the process. For one thing, the green yarn refused to felt, despite my most strenuous efforts. I put it through a hot water machine wash twice, tried felting by hand first in hot tap water and then in a steaming pot of water on the stove, and also put it in the dryer three separate times. No dice. I don't know what kind of yarn it is, but I do know it is 100% wool, so it must have been superwash wool. I can't say my efforts were entirely wasted, though, because I did manage to get rid of that awful rumpled look -- the yarn sprang back. This at least meant it was worth proceeding to finish the project. It's bigger than it's supposed to be, of course, but it's still a very suitable size for a toddler.





The other problem I ran into was that I couldn't seem to find a toggle that looked right. Rather than buy one of the ones Fabricland had, I decided I'd save my money and make a knitted flower that would serve as a toggle and echo the flowered print I'd chosen as a lining. The pattern doesn't call for lining the bag, but my unfelted version really needed lining to give it shape and structure, because it was sad and limp-looking and would stretch all to hell as soon as Olivia put any of her little treasures in it. I used a cotton floral print and the stiffest interfacing I had on hand. The bottom interfacing is hair canvas, and the body and top flap has some sort of thick, soft, fleecy interfacing. The lining I made ended up looking so good and fitting so smoothly into the bag that I was half-tempted to turn it inside out. And it gave the bag quite a good shape and body -- it can nearly stand alone.

So, all's well that ends well, but I wasn't too thrilled with this one. It's okay, but it's not as cute as the sample bag. But Olivia will probably like it, and that's what matters. As you can see, I also got her a book to go with it. I would have put a cat-themed print lining in the bag too, but couldn't find one that went with my colour scheme.

The Boiled and Stabbed Slippers

Several years ago, after I launched this blog, I came across a picture of an irresistibly cute pair of slippers on Pinterest.

The slippers were the French Press Felted Slippers, by Melynda Bernardi. I already had a pair of rather nice slippers I had made out of a bulky weight wool yarn, but it didn't take me long to decide I much preferred the style of these. I then proceeded to take apart the first pair and knit up a pair of French Press slippers.

And here's the result. This yarn is Patons Classic Wool Worsted, in a colour called Tree Bark Mix. The slippers were knitted with two strands on 10mm needles. It amused me to remember that my pair of 10mm needles were the first pair of knitting needles I ever bought and that I'd used them exactly once before: to make my very first sweater, in a tragically ill-chosen candy floss pink yarn, when I was ten years old.

The knitting part of this slipper project went quickly and easily (last January!) and then the slippers spent nearly an entire year in my work basket, waiting for me to sew them together and then felt them. I had never felted anything before (not on purpose, that is), and kept putting off the task of finishing them the way I tend to do when I don't know how to do something. Finally at about 6:30 p.m. on New Year's Eve I started work on the felting.

I hadn't read anything on felting aside from the instructions in the pattern, which was a mistake, especially given that I wasn't felting the slippers in my washing machine as the instructions say to do. I have a front loading washing machine and didn't think it would work as well as a top loader with a central agitator. I thought I could do the felting in the kitchen sink. I was making some progress, but it was too slow, and as I was using my hands to agitate the knitting, that limited how hot the water could be. I then got the idea of felting the pieces in a measuring cup of hot water heated in the microwave, using a wooden spoon to agitate them. This worked better but I was having trouble keeping the water hot, so I switched methods again and began felting the pieces in a saucepan on the stove. Whenever I wanted to try the slippers on for size, I'd lift them out of the saucepan with tongs, douse them in a sink full of cool water, and squeeze the water out as best I could. This method proved fairly effective, but did it ever take a long time. I had initially thought I'd be done the job in half an hour (felting with a machine is supposed to take 20-25 minutes), but I worked on it for four hours, partly because I had taken awhile to hit on the right method, and partly because I made the mistake of doing the slippers in three parts: the straps by themselves, then one slipper body at a time.

Not only did doing the pieces separately make the process much longer, it also proved a bad idea because the colour of the felted fabric changed. By the time I was done the second slipper, I realized to my horror that I had two different colour slippers: one was a grayish khaki green, and the other was a dark olive green. However, it was 10:30 on New Year's Eve, I'd just spent hours standing over a boiling hot saucepan repeatedly stabbing my knitting with a wooden spoon, and I was NOT going to keep working and trying to fix that mistake that night. I turned off the stove and cleared up a little and left the kitchen to go relax for the rest of the evening.

The next morning I checked the slippers again and found that, besides being two different colours, they still were a little too large for me. I boiled both the slippers and the straps on the stove for an additional hour and a half, checking for size every half hour. After that hour and a half they were a perfect fit... and, thankfully, the same colour again. Though that's a grand total of five and half hours of felting time. I don't think I spent that long knitting the slippers.

As you can see from the above photo of one of the slippers with the leftover yarn it was made from, the finished slippers are a completely different colour from what they were originally. I'm still astounded by this colour change. How on earth did the colour become so much darker and richer? I would have expected it to fade if I'd expected any colour change at all, which I didn't. Fortunately, I still like the resulting colour. Unfortunately, the buttons I'd bought for the slippers looked terrible against this new colour, and I had to make a quick trip to Fabricland to get some different ones. Another problem arose: I was supposed to use unfelted yarn to stitch the end of the straps on, and the stitches were bound to show. I looked in my stash for a similar green but didn't find a yarn that would be less conspicuous -- green is a difficult colour to match. I settled for trying to make my stitches as hidden and inconspicuous as possible. They don't look as bad as I feared, and no one is going to look that closely at my feet anyway.

The instructions recommend spreading some puffy paint on the bottom of the slippers, for the sake of traction. I am reluctant to do this. Someone gave me a pair of those socks with treads on them for Christmas one year and the treads hurt my feet when I walked on them (Moreover, the treaded socks would not stay on but kept working their way off my feet -- I had to keep reaching down and yanking them back up. I wore them once, for about two hours, and then put them in the garbage.) I'm afraid the puffy paint will be uncomfortable to walk on. On the other hand, I have all wood and tile floors in my home and am very accident-prone. Perhaps there are other traction options.

I'm not sure there's any more felting in my future. I definitely won't tackle another project without first making sure I'm more informed about the process. Even without doing research, knowing about the stove top boiling method and doing all the pieces at once would cut my time in less than half... so perhaps.