Nomadic Wanderings

This post is coming to you from "Shades of Brown" in Tulsa. We arrived yesterday afternoon for our little long weekend graduation trip. I'm looking forward to a small-ish yarn crawl to String, er, Fringe and to Loops (evil, but cool concept store competition) with my M-I-L tomorrow. The in-laws flight was delayed 8 HOURS today, so we'll have to amend our plans slightly. Behind on my Christmas knitting...

CLOSE Call

Hmm, it seems that felting and blogging about felting concurrently is not a good idea for myself (even though my computer was 2 feet away from the washing machine in the kitchen)... only by dumb luck did I end up with a perfect size 7 women's slipper for my 13 yo niece. The first cycle ran through and then suddenly I heard spinning, stopped the machine, checked the slippers (which were still a size 10) and reset the washer. Next thing I knew, I noticed that the washer wasn't running at all - the water had already drained out, so apparently, I can be totally oblivious to my surroundings. When I checked the slippers after the second cycle, they were a perfect size 7. Yay!

I was a lot more careful about timing and setting a timer the first and second time around for this pattern but I caught on to the fact that checking the slippers after 10 minutes was much too soon to expect them to be done. I also figured that since I'm right here, again, TWO feet from the washing machine that I might, oh, say, notice the ambient noise.

Ingenious...

I'm back, picture-less for now (bo-ring, sorry)... Thanks for all the tips on the bargain shopping, I've passed along those "hints" to B and now I can't wait for Christmas morning. :-)

The felted slipper count:

• 2 pairs knitted & felted (DONE) - 1 in Cascade 220, 1 in LiteLopi (big mistake using that Lopi for felting, incidentally)
• 2 pairs knitted only - 1 in Cascade 220, 1 in LiteLopi
• 1 pair knitted but seams not sewn - Cascade 220
• 1 pair knitted and IN THE WASHING machine (hmm, hope Cascade 220 is colourfast*)
• 3 pairs to go (wind the yarn, knit, sew, and felt)
• Am I insane to be thinking about this? ("this" was going to be a link to Fabric Place's 25% off everything sale Dec 1-6, i.e., right now) Why is blogger not uploading pictures for me right now?

Anyway, while I like the Cascade 220, one of the reasons I considered the LiteLopi was because I'd save time not having to wind the yarn into balls from hanks. Does this make me lazy? I suppose this will become a moot point should my Christmas wish come true.

Oh, so now the ingenious part of this post... I was lamenting that my gift-knitting of felted slippers was difficult because even if I surreptitiously discovered my relatives & friends shoe sizes I would not know the exact size or when to stop the felting process. A lady at work suggested buying ODOR EATERS and using that as a guide since they have tracings of women's 5 through 10. Isn't that the best idea? You clever readers probably already figured that out or knew about it but I hadn't yet and it just struck me as a brilliant solution.

* Why YES, I *should* know better and have tested my light pink and dark purple colour combination before going to town on my niece's slippers, but well... what can I say?