Our house is typical American, built like there was no tomorrow, and OPEC was a brand of candy... single windows in
metal frames to be sure the outside temperature is efficiently transmitted to the inside. Luckily, a knitter can take it into her own hands to do something about those feet that are chilled by the constant draft.
I had been wanting to try felting, or rather fulling for a while (I believe fulling is actually the correct term for what we refer to as felting of a knitted item -
det samme som forskellen mellem filtning og valkning på dansk), so
Fuzzy Feet seemed like the perfect thing, curing the cold feet situation at the same time.
The knitting is really ugly, because of the loose gauge and frogged yarn
So the project was actually hibernating for a long time due to the ugliness. But I managed to finish, and went to a laundromat with top-loading machines. All the descriptions of fulling tells you how careful you must be, how the process suddenly speeds up and it's a matter of seconds to save the piece before it turns into a tiny lump of felt... So I was watching carefully as I ran them in one warm cycle with a towel for agitation. Good thing a laundromat has so many
special types of people to keep you company while you wait... Well, after the warm cycle, the stitches were drawn much more together, but the overall size of the slippers was still very large. I wasn't sure the temperature was really 40 C as a warm cycle is supposed to be, so I ran them again, this time in a hot cycle, which is supposed to be 60 C, but didn't even feel like 40 C. Well, it helped more than the warm cycle, the stitch definition beginning to go away, but the size still much too large. But by now, my strange activity had caught the eye of the laundromat owner. He didn't tell me to stop it, but I decided to quietly slip out with my wet wool before accused of anything.
Also, each wash was $2.5, so it was time to take matters even more into my own hands. Transported the thing home, made some really hot soap water and a bowl of really cold water, and scrubbed them around in the two by turn until the size looked right. Then, the really fun part. Put some plastic bags on my feet, stepped most of the water out of the slippers in a towel, put slippers on, and walked around on the carpets for a while. The slippers are now perfectly moulded to my feet, and here they are the next day after drying:
Looks like something that would do in the Sherwood Forest :)
After about a week of use, they have softened a bit, but the size has not changed much. They are very warm and comfortable. The only worry is that they may wear out too soon!
Yuck! Not only does the color change to pink in an unfortunate way, the cast off edge is also too bulky. Fast-forward some months, I finally unraveled this edge, and tried a sewn cast-off from the Fall '08 Interweave magazine. This did not work out at all! Mostly because of the knitter, I think, not so much the method itself... Then, removed some of the pink, and cast off in the standard way a bit tighther, and it looks much better. The two ends now look similar:
So I'm happy now. Some other details: 37 stitches wide, 4 skeins Silk Garden total (2 each of colorways 270 and 84), 4.5 mm needles. Used shadow knitting edge according to Vivian Høxbro's book, it results in a smooth edge where the color changes are hidden:
