The Heathen Housewife

I’m not sure why I’ve been so quiet about the little project I started for Julie last week, but for some reason I wanted to keep it to myself until it was done, and now it is, so here we go. Julie hates wearing socks, and although she never complains about it, her feet are always little icicles in the winter. She noticed that Joe always wears his felted clogs at home when the weather’s cold, and that I wear my Haflinger felt clogs because I need the arch support, and she asked me a couple of times where her slippers were. That jump-started the urge I had last year to knit up a pair of toddler-sized clogs for her, one that was strong enough at the time for me to buy the pattern and nothing else.

So I dug out the pattern, and a week ago last Friday, we were having the kind of afternoon where someone was going to die if we didn’t get the heck out of the house, so I took her to the shop and let her pick out some yarn. With naked and cold little feet as my motivation, I worked diligently on the project for the past week, and seeing as how it’s a pretty small project and the new Sophie bedtime regime is allowing me at least an hour to myself most evenings, I managed to finish the knitting on Friday night. I must say, I don’t particularly enjoy knitting felted clogs. There is a bit too much counting and fiddly stuff for my taste, with too little rhythm. I don’t mind a challenging knit, just as long as there is enough repetition of something for me to get into a groove. This wasn’t it, but it was worth the small effort to go ahead and get it done.

Of course I took some before-felting pictures. First, on my own very large foot (Size 11 women’s). It’s a little stretched, but not all that much.

Second, the pair with a ruler. They were about ten inches long. The one on the right had a bit of a wonky shape to the toe for some reason, and I was really hoping it would disappear in the felting process. I SO know better than that, but these are just for at-home wear anyway, so I wasn’t worried.

I looked around and found four or five loads of laundry waiting to go through the wash, so I started the felting process. We have a front-loader, and I’ve felted in it before, but it does take longer to work than our old top-loader did, and there is less control over the process since the door locks once the cycle starts and you can’t mess with it midstream the way you can the top-loaders. There was no reason to worry, because it took a good two cycles just to see the process start to work. After four trips through the wash, they started to look like they might eventually fit Julie’s feet, but there were spots that had felted unevenly. I went ahead and threw them in for a fifth round, and the less-felted spots were more pronounced.

I was out of dirty laundry by this point anyway, so I tried a little hand-felting. Twenty minutes is a long time when you’re standing at the kitchen sink scrubbing the dickens out of a pair of wool slippers. Joe came through the room at one point and complained of the wet-wool stench. After a while, and some improvement, I gave up and went in search of another load of dirty laundry. The bathroom rugs weren’t all that clean, and they could go in a hot-cold cycle. Who ever thought that knitting would actually motivate me to get my chores done? Wonders never cease.

I pulled the clogs out after this sixth cycle, and decided that they needed at least once more through. There was absolutely no more laundry to be found. Okay, I could have stripped the sheets off a bed, but it was getting late on Sunday night, and I didn’t want to risk having the guest bed naked if Sophie and I needed to use it for a 3 a.m. scream fest. I resigned myself to waiting for some actual necessary washing.

Lo and behold, Julie woke up this morning and gave me what I was wishing for – three more loads of laundry. She had an “accident” while sitting not only in her bed, but on her pillow in her bed. I’m so used to this toilet-training business that I didn’t even blink. We got her cleaned up and redressed for school in a heart beat, and I had my clogs and the dirty laundry in the washer before we were out the door. Three more trips through the washer today, and I am done with them. They are not perfectly felted, as there is still quite a bit of stitch definition:

But they are about the right size and felted well enough that they will keep her little feet a bit warmer. Here they are, obviously too small for my feet now, and measuring in at just what the pattern said they would, 7″. Julie has big feet for a three-year-old ’cause she takes after her mama.

I still need to do something for the bottoms to make them non-skid. I think I’m just going to get some puff paint and draw some footprints on the soles.

I can’t close without a cute-kid picture…Here’s Julie and her grandmother at the Mall of America riding the rides. Joe’s parents took her there to play all day Saturday, and they seem to have had a very nice time.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 14th, 2006 at 5:17 am and is filed under FO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.