This story has its roots in my early knitting days–those crisp autumn days of yore (AKA last year). My very first knitting project was, not surprisingly, a scarf. Even less surprising was the fact that I didn’t like the pattern and so just did my own thing. For my second project, I made a felted handbag. It didn’t matter to me that I’d never knitted anything in the round or that I’d hadn’t needed to increase or decrease stitches while making that first scarf. I figured if I could read the pattern, I could knit the pattern. Turns out, I was right and I soon found myself the proud owner of a lovely little felted handbag.

Over the next few months, I would occasionally ask the Spouse if he’d like me to knit him anything. He always said no until one day when he told me that he’d like a pair of slippers. Fantastic!

I bustled myself off to the yarn shop and, after taking some advice from the shop owners, I purchased a pattern and yarn for a pair of mens’ slippers. They knit up quickly and soon the Spouse’s tootsies were snug in them:

The Spouse was grateful for the slippers but, apparently, they weren’t quite what he had had in mind. You see, he’d seen my lovely little felted handbag and had been coveting felted slippers.

No problem! Now I knew what to make him for Christmas!

I worked on those slippers in quiet moments, confident that he wouldn’t recognise what they were while they were on the needles. When they were all finished, I tied them into a pillowcase and tossed them in the washer. Wheeee! another Christmas prezzie out of the way and not a day too soon…Christmas was just days away!

They look sort of normal, don’t they?

Well, they’re not. His special-for-him-felted-slippers-prezzie turned out to be the most misshapen, distorted freakazoid footwear imaginable. I immediately ran out to the nearest shopping mall and picked through all the mens’ slippers I could locate, searching for his size. (Just imagine how many dads and granddads get slippers for Christmas and just how many of those dads and granddads have average-sized feet and you get some sense of how arduous the task of locating slippers three days before Christmas really was!)

The Spawn and I decided to wrap up FrankenFeet anyway…you know, as a gag gift.

How much of a gag? Well, here they are with my foot alongside for scale:

As it turned out, the Spouse figured out that if he wore his ribby slippers INSIDE the FrankenFeet slippers, they kept his feet toasty and weren’t too too ginormous. (You can see the ribby slippers inside the FrankenFeet).

As for me, well, those slippers put me off felting entirely and I have studiously ignored anything felted, no matter how cute, ever since.

Right up until a couple of weeks ago when the Spouse broached the subject of slippers…

Remarkably and inexplicably, he asked if I could make him a new pair of felted slippers.  (I can’t imagine why he didn’t want to keep wearing FrankenFeet!) He had faith in me and my abilities and was confident that I could make him another pair, one that would fit.

I tell you what…he had more faith in me than I did but, I set my fears and trepidation aside and embarked on another pair of felted slippers. This time, I didn’t need no steenking pattern. I’d just make a pair of big ass socks and felt the hell out of them. I’d swatch and measure and felt and do everything to make sure that these felted slippers were the felted slippers of his dreams. I wouldn’t disappoint him again!

And so, that’s what I did. I knit a swatch, pinned it out, and measured it like I’d never measured a swatch before. I wrote notes on number of stitches, number of rows, width, length…you name, I measured it. Then came time to felt it. I knew I had to run a load through the washing machine on HOT that contained nothing but that swatch and an old pair of jeans.

This was perhaps the hardest part for me, namely because I’m cheap. Really cheap. The thought of running a HOT load in the washer makes me break out in a cold sweat. The thought of running a hot load in the washer for a single swatch practically rendered me unconscious. Try as I might, I couldn’t think of any other way to achieve the felting needed nor could I think of any way I might mitigate the costs of that one small load of hot water. I couldn’t combine it with any of my laundry as nothing I own has ever been washed in hot water. What if it shrank?! Then where would I be? (Out buying new clothes, that’s where. And that brings up a whole ‘nuther set of issues for me…like why doesn’t a pair of name jeans cost $12 any more?)

So I gritted my teeth, girded my loins, and set the water temperature to hot.

Once the swatch was felted, I took more measurements and not just of the swatch. I measured the Spouse’s feet from every angle I could imagine might come into play. Then I broke out the calculator…I needed to calculate just how big these big ass socks needed to be.

And then I knit.

After one BA sock was finished, the Spouse looked like his faith in me was wavering.

“Is that smaller than the last pair you made?”

Well, not really but I wasn’t going to tell him that. I pointed out that the first pair had been knit on bigger needles: 11s whereas these ones were knit on 10.5s. And the first pair had been knit double-stranded which I’m sure had some effect on how they felted. Maybe. I think.

“Maybe you should felt that one before starting on the next one. You know…just in case.”

Good idea!

My internal struggle with the water temperature was more quickly resolved this time around and, in no time, I had one felted slipper to show the Spouse:

It’s very hard to tell scale when it’s just sitting there on its own, isn’t it? Here’s a photo of the normal felted slipper alongside one of the FrankenFeet:

I am redeemed!

(And as soon as I get the other big ass sock finished, the Spouse will have a pair of normal felted slippers!)

Or what the well-dressed whippet will be wearing this winter!

Some of you know that I taught myself to knit last summer and have been busy over the past year, knitting up a storm. Most of you know that I have a problem with authority so it should come as no surprise that I don’t really like knitting patterns as they are written (”Don’t tell me what to do, dammit!”). So I find myself knitting a lot of “custom” items…things that I just knit with no pattern.

I’m still working on different dog sweater designs, in the hopes that I can come up with the perfect cardigan for Streaka, Queen of the Gimps. As Streaka does have a pullover and all of the others’ sweaters and jackets reek of skunk (remember the Great Skunk War of January 2009?), I decided to try making Rogie a sweater as a prototype. That way he’d get a skunk-free sweater and, if it worked out, I could knit another one for Streaka.

And so I got some cheap blue yarn and started knitting Rogie’s sweater. Since he is my Roges and I do like to spoil him, I decided to knit him a special sweater…one with cables and seed stitch and stocking stitch and reverse stocking stitch. I’d give it an asymmetric closure, just like the ganseys from the Breton coast of France. He’d look like a little fisherman.

I worked on that sweater through the heat of the summer, picturing Rogie wearing it out on the North Sea. He’d have his feet firmly planted on the gunwhales of his fishing boat and a Gauloise clenched in his teeth. Maybe I could knit him a little matching beret and he could talk with a French accent.

I was so excited about that sweater.

Finally the day came when I could put it on the Little Dude and see how it looked. It fit like a glove…like it had been made for him!

But what’s this? Where’s his penis?

I poked and prodded. Oh, there it is! It was tucked up inside the sweater…

Yes, Rogie’s beautiful blue gansey would be a beautiful blue diaper if he ever wore it. I’d forgotten to take into account “that certain part of the male anatomy” when measuring the chest piece for the sweater.

Even though it had been made especially for Rogie, I decided to try it on the beautiful (and penis-free) Streaka. Maybe she could wear it and pretend she was Joan of Arc or something. (I’d just have to keep her away from the fireplace because, after all, I’d knit the sweater out of acrylic and we all know that acrylic and the auto-de-fe don’t mix!)

Alas, Rogie is built quite differently from Streaka and so the sweater doesn’t really fit her that well. It’s a bit too short in length but too big in the chest. I suppose she could wear it in a pinch but it’s been my experience that, if you put a slightly too large sweater on a whippet, you usually end up with that sweater lying in a heap somewhere in the garden.

Damn that penis!

Now that the days are much cooler, I’ve gotten into the habit of taking my morning coffee outside with the dogs. My favourite thing to do is to sit on one of the low walls in the garden, sip my coffee, and pet all the dogs.

One morning a few weeks ago, Streaka didn’t feel inclined to come and visit with me and so, knowing that she is an old lady and due some sort of consideration for that, I set my coffee down on the wall and went to see her on her dog bed. (She says I should call it a “pallet” because that’s what Cleopatra reclined on but that’s a story for another day.)

Streaka got her scritches and her pets and a wee neck massage but after a while, my back got tired from bending over her “pallet” (because, after all, I too am an old lady and due some sort of consideration for that) and so I returned to my wall and my coffee.

Well, I returned to my wall. My coffee was gone. Oh, the mug was there but it was empty.

There were three possible suspects in the coffee theft: Tighe, Dayton, and Rogie. Tighe was immediately cleared of the crime as, being the old man that he is, he had gone back to bed after a couple of kisses and a pet. I knew Rogie liked coffee but only cold…apparently, his tongue is very sensitive to heat. (He claims that avoiding hot beverages preserves his superior palate but I’m not sure about that…how far can you trust the palate of a dog who thinks chowing down on bark mulch is fine dining?)

One kiss from Dayton and I had my culprit. He may have looked innocent but there was no way of hiding his coffee breath.

At this point in the story, his theft of my coffee was “cute”. Of course, the following morning, it wasn’t quite as cute. He didn’t even wait for me to set my mug down before sticking his nose into it.

Please! I need my coffee too!

The third day, I decided that I really didn’t want to share my coffee with Dayton and so I fixed him his own. Rather than using a mug, I poured some cream and then some coffee into a small bowl and carried both it and my coffee into the garden. In total, it was roughly half a cup of coffee…which was basically the amount that Dayton was stealing from me.

It didn’t take Dayton long to figure out that the bowl of coffee was his, all his. He happily lapped up the bowl’s contents and then, being the fastidious boy that he his, licked up all of his spillage. (A whippet drinking coffee from a shallow bowl is not a sight for the faint-hearted, or those with OCD issues, for that matter.)

Perhaps every second or third day, I’d let Dayton have some coffee. (I didn’t want to set him up for caffeine addiction, you know.) On Friday morning, I headed out to the garden with two coffees: one for me and one for Dayton. Dids immediately jumped up and put his feet on my arm in an attempt to start drinking from his bowl. About half of his coffee went straight down the sleeve of my housecoat…needless to say, I was not pleased.

Still, time softened the memory of that mishap and so this morning, I poured two coffees and headed out to the garden. Dayton didn’t jump this time but he had eyes only for his bowl. He drank it down in one go and then looked longingly at my mug. He backed up from my spot on the wall, spun around in circles a few times, and looked pointedly at my mug again.

Yeah, the spinning around in circles should have been my cue that he’d had enough but Dayton has always known just how to work the crowd. I poured him a shade more coffee from my mug.

After petting Streaka, I noticed a small piece of paper sticking out of Dayton’s apartment. Apparently, he’s been making his Christmas list. Number one on his list is an espresso machine, specifically an Illy machine: http://tinyurl.com/ykcaglo

Maybe I’ll get him a Starbuck’s card…

About ten days ago, Wayde opened up a new avenue of design for me. He came up with the idea that we do some collaborative work…I design outdoor pieces (gates, trellises, garden accessories, etc.,), he vets the design (because I know nothing of practicality), and then he builds them.

My first piece is a gate/fence panel. I tried designing it using a 3-D sketch software application but had trouble kludging my way through it so fired up Illustrator for the design.

Wayde added up how much material we’d need, brought it home, and taught me how to use his metal saw so that I could cut the steel to length. He then spent several hours welding it up. (Note to self: lots of cuts means lots of welds means lots of time!)

Today, the panel is finished and (almost) ready to hang. It won’t actually function as a gate, since we don’t need it to:

I’m thrilled with how it turned out; it looks just how I thought it would!