slippers

slipper evolution /  by Katherine Hajer

I’m back to prototyping slippers made closer to shoe-making construction. Unlike last time, where the slippers were all for other people to borrow, these are all for me. I wear out slippers frequently enough that making a clutch of slippers and setting them aside for next winter is a good idea. Besides, it’s using up stash!

The first pair I made was from a free Bernat pattern which renders slippers that look like Ugg boots. I’m not a fan of actual Ugg boots, but they work out to be great slippers when the annual Toronto deep freeze happens in January-February.

The next pair were me improvising on a crocheted double sole to create ballet-type slippers. I did one pair in the regular acrylic leftovers I use for slippers, and one in dishcloth cotton for when the weather is in between slippers and bare feet.

The teal-and-lime pair are my most recent experiment. Crocheted double soles as usual, but then I pick up stitches and knit the uppers. That way the soles have a nice dense fabric (and then doubled), but the uppers get all the stretch and flexibility from knitting. (Yes, crocheters will claim I can crochet the whole thing, but since I know how to do both, I’m happy to switch between the two fabrics to get the effect I want).

I’ve currently got a medium-grey pair on the go with orange soles. They’re basically the same as the teal and lime slippers, but I’m trying to refine the shaping a bit (making the toe box narrower).

Next iteration, I want to try to fit the soles to my actual foot size better. The ultimate goal is to get a pair of these onto flip-flop soles to make true indoor (and maybe outdoor?) shoes.

functional failures /  by Katherine Hajer

I've had an idea to make slippers which look like sneakers for a while. There are some patterns around, but the ones that don't look terrible you have to pay for. Maybe it's just me being cheap, but I've yet to see a slipper design that blew me away so much I wanted to pay for it.

Fortunately, I did find a free, multi-sized pattern for loafers at Whistle & Ivy. I used them for making the slippers for my chiropractor's office, and I used them again for the sneaker slippers.

The great thing about the Whistle & Ivy pattern is that the construction is very shoe-like. That means that you can keep the sole construction the same and play around with different uppers shapes. Although the blog claims the sole is supposed to be a little smaller than your foot, I find the sole comes out much smaller. The pattern makes it easy to make the sole bigger, though — I just make the measurements comparable with a pair of commercially-made ballet flats I own. This time I also made triple soles, instead of the double soles called for in the pattern. I figured the extra layer wasn't a bad thing, and it makes the side of the soles closer in thickness to those on actual sneakers.

I'm pleased with everything about the sneaker slippers except for the white toe box, which is far too big. Next time, I'm going to make it shorter, and start the rest of the upper sooner, and make the tongue longer.

These are entirely made of stash. The bottom sole uses the same black wool as the upper, and the middle sole is some variegated yarn left over from when I made felted slippers. The inside sole is made from turquoise dishcloth cotton so my feet will stay dry. The white parts of the uppers and the embellishments (outer rim of all the sole layers, toe box, star applique, laces, red striping) are all acrylic. Meh. I hand wash all my handmade stuff anyhow.

In all, these used up two and a half balls of stash yarn, plus a little red yarn. Next time I'll use up a little less white, but use a different colour for the bottom sole so that I have more black for the uppers. In the meantime these count as a functional failure, in that they are wearable, just not exactly what I was aiming for.

surprise purple projects /  by Katherine Hajer

My sister-in-law asked if I could knit the nieces some cowls. The brief was: make two the same so she wouldn't have to worry about which one went onto which girl, make them purple to match their winter coats, and make them snug-ish — the whole point was to replace dangly scarves and avoid a scarf's tendency to get caught on things, require tying/arranging to wear, or slip off and get lost.

I did some Googling around, and found this free pattern which comes in both children's and women's sizes. 9mm needles, bulky yarn, 18 stitches, and 72 rows. Graft the ends together and you're done. Both the cowls took about four episodes of Welcome to Night Vale plus a couple episodes of The Musketeers.

cowl closeup.jpg

I got two skeins of yarn (acrylic — the nieces aren't ready for wool yet) for the cowls, and they took up just over half a skein of yarn each. That left me with stash, and I really want not to accumulate any more stash. I need slippers, and I had already found this free pattern for slippers that look like Ugg boots. Although sometimes I feel like the only woman in the Western world who doesn't like Uggs, I figured they would make good slippers.

I went back to the yarn shop and picked up two more skeins of yarn. There was enough left over from the cowls to make four sole pieces (I wanted a double sole), and the two new skeins of yarn made the uppers. I was done the slippers in time to wear them for the dinner party I had that night.

There were absolutely no mods to the cowl pattern, and the only thing I changed for the slippers (besides adding an extra sole layer) was that I used foundation single crochet to start each piece, used a standing stitch to start the leg parts of the uppers, and spiralled my way up the leg instead of formally slip-stitching and chain-one-ing at the end of each round. Instead, I just slip-stitched at the top of the boot leg and finished off.

Oh, and I slip-stitched the upper and sole layers together instead of using single crochet (!) like the pattern called for.

After all that, I have virtually no stash — just some odds and ends I'll use for provisional cast on sections on a project I already have in-flight. I'll have to blog about that one shortly.

Meanwhile, this is how the boot slipper soles look after just being worn for a few hours:


Now you can see why I wanted to make double soles. It should last me the winter, anyhow, and the yarn was on sale for Boxing Day, so there's that. They'll be fine. While acrylic is not as warm as other options and will need to be washed more frequently than, say, wool, my apartment tends to be warm anyhow, so I only need light foot insulation, and acrylic is easy to wash.

rapid prototyping /  by Katherine Hajer

Toronto is in the middle of the annual "deep freeze" part of the winter — where air masses migrate south from the Arctic and make the local temperature very cold. We've been in the -10C to -15C range for a week, with the wind chill making it feel more like -30C. It's finally warmed up to around 0C today.

But that got me thinking of slippers. My hairdresser has a basket of slippers by the salon entrance so people can remove their wet, slush-covered boots at the door and wear a pair of dry, comfy slippers while they're getting their hair done. I mentioned it to my chiropractor, since her office has hardwood flooring, and proposed I make some slippers out of leftover yarn for the waiting room.

The criteria:

  • Use stash yarn only (so I clear more stuff out of my apartment — there's my selfish motivation in all this)
  • Unisex styles and colours
  • Durable (long lifecycle — I wanted to make them and then not have to worry about making replacements for a long time)
  • Machine washable
  • Last but not least, they had to appeal to people who are not necessarily into the whole "handmade" aesthetic. I didn't want anything that gave a first impression of, "ooh, saw something like that at a charity sale once. It was really ugly."

There are lots of slipper patterns around. Remarkably few of them meet the criteria, especially that last one. And while usually I'm all for vintage, a lot of these patterns were good reminders that not everything about the 1950s and 60s was chic and elegant.

My first attempt were some "ballet flat slippers" that came out looking like Archie Bunker's grandmother made them as something for someone to wear as punishment. Partly it was the colour scheme I chose, partly the textured stitches (which leave big holes between rows when worn).

Also, even though the slippers were entirely crocheted, they didn't feel very substantial. I could see the soles wearing out very quickly.

Bottom line was, I just didn't like them. So they got ripped out, and I went pattern hunting some more.

Eventually I found a pattern for crocheted loafers with two-layered soles and parts of their construction modelled after shoe-making. I thought the results were acceptable:

I like how the inner sole colour peeks out just below the upper. The pattern came in a wide range of sizes, and the results are shoe-like enough to calm everyone but the most pro-factory slipper-wearers.

Being crocheted, the yarn consumption is relatively high for the results. That's fine for the soles, which need the fabric density anyhow, but I wondered if there were other options for the uppers. I tried making a basic "kimono" upper, and was pleased with the results.

Funny thing: the inner sole and the stitching holding the two soles and the upper together are recovered yarn from those ugly slippers I started with. These got worked on in public a bit, and I got some nice compliments on the colour combination. Maybe it was the pattern all along, or maybe adding the red helps.

The nice thing about the knitted upper is that it's just a plain rectangle, and only about twenty rows high, including the border. Although I think this prototype worked, next time I make slippers like these (um, next Tuesday night, most likely), I'm going to make the uppers about four rows higher so that the overlap at the front is more pronounced and so that there is slightly more coverage at the back of the heel.

I made the knitted upper so that the stitch gauge was approximately the same as the stitch gauge on the crocheted soles. That way, when I was slip stitching everything together, I could count on matching one knit stitch to one inner sole stitch to one outer sole stitch. There was a little bit of easing when I got to the toe, but not much.

The completion of the first pair of kimono slippers led me back to loafers. In the original pattern, you are supposed to make the top part of the toe box as a separate piece and then slip stitch it to the upper, easing to fit. It felt awkward to do, and was a little tricky since the toe doesn't actually fit in place.

On my next pair of loafers, I experimented, working U-shaped rows and matching decreases to the increases used while making the soles. It took two tries, but I was able to finish the toe box without breaking the yarn. I think I'm going to make all the loafer-style slippers this way from now on:

In the meantime, while I was making all of these, it occurred to me that it would be good to provide a basket to put them all in. So I found a pattern on-line, grabbed four mismatched skeins of white acrylic yarn from my stash, and had at it. In about two and a half hours, I had crocheted as far as I could with the four skeins without running out of yarn:

Now I just have to make enough slippers to fill the basket!