Sausage Slippers?

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Wow, this was a disaster, uh, PROTOTYPE.

The pattern (DROPS 104-10, also available in Finnish) is really cute but this just turned out all wrong. (Mostly my fault.) I was using a different yarn so my gauge was off. To compensate, I decided to make one size larger than what I wear without doing any actual calculations. (Ha.) I'd nearly finished the first slipper before I whipped out the calculator and realized it was going to be too small after felting. Sigh, off to the frog pond.

The second time, I thought I did the calculations correctly and used the stitch counts for the largest size. The problem was, I also took the length in centimeters -- not row counts -- according to the largest size, so the slipper was looong and pointy. I duplicate-stitched the skull motif on and thought it'd shrink just fine (it didn't) or at least I could stretch it into a proper shape after felting (I couldn't).

See the pic? That's the size after felting. I never made a pair for this one.

There was some wonkiness with the pattern, too. I didn't like how the heel turned out, not even after felting. It was just too... floppy. What do you think of these instructions:

Fold edge on each side of heel in to 3rd sts towards RS and sew until a sausage edge forms.

Seriously? Sausage edge? I never could understand what they wanted.

Third time's the charm, eh? I'm having another go at the pattern, this time with both slippers. And I have some ideas about the heel.

Skull Slippers (Ravelry project page)
Pattern: DROPS 104-10 Felted slippers in 2 threads of Eskimo (available also in Finnish and tons of other languages)
Yarn: Novita Huopanen (100% feltable wool) double stranded, colors #370 (moss) and #353 (grass)
Needles: 10 mm plastic circular needle (huge!)
Mods: custom size: stitch counts from size 43/45, length (in cm) from size 38/39; knitting the foot in circular knitting, three-needle bind-off, duplicate-stitched skull motif, tweaked heel (once I get to it...)

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