For many years now I have been wearing a great pair of shearling slippers that missbedora gave to me. They have been abundantly warm, as is evidenced by the fact that I managed to wear a big hole in the bottom of both slippers. Yes, right through the leather. There is almost no wool left on the inside of them, and they are sadly not as warm as they were in their former glory. So while I have loved these slippers (thanks hun!) they are being retired to greener pastures.
Which means that I needed a new pair of slippers. I like to be able to wear my slippers with bare feet, so I needed something that would be fitted but with no seams or weirdness inside. Enter the French Press Slipper pattern!
This pattern has gone RAMPANT in the knitter world, and there is a reason why. It is well written, super pretty and functional. It doesn’t cost a lot for the materials and you can really customize them to your taste.
Mine were made with Patons Classic wool, because when I checked out some of the 2700+ pairs on Ravelry, the Patons seemed to have a better felted look than my usual Cascade 220 go to. There is something about grey felt that I love, so that was an easy choice for me.
Once I knitted them, I was going to use a friend’s top loader to felt them, but I did a little reading and figured I could do it myself in the kitchen sinks. I filled one sink up with nearly boiling water, and kept the kettle going in the background. I filled the other one up with ice water. I added soap, the dish rack and the slippers to the hot sink, and starting beating the daylights out of them with a potato masher. Every so often I plunked them into the ice water, added more boiling water to the other sink, and repeated the process. All told it took about half an hour.
I think the big benefit of doing it by hand is that you can really control the amount of felting. If you see a spot that needs more, you can just work that with your hands a bit. And I was able to take them out of the sink and try them on a lot, so I got a perfect fit.
I seamed them up at the shop WIP finishing day yesterday, and Natasha was kind enough to let me raid her awesome button stash for a couple of really cool ones.
Don’t they just make the slippers?
The only thing I have left to do is put either puff paint or some suede on the bottoms of these. They are darn slippery on the hardwood floors. From one pair of wool slippers to another I go!
