Dear Melynda,

I love my slippers, Melynda. I really do.

When I first saw your pattern, it was love. I grabbed a coworker with no knitting experience and drug her to my LYS, and we stocked up on yarn and watched as it clicked away on the swift and ball winder. Then I taught her to knit as we made our first pairs of your slippers.

Together, we seamed up each slipper, and then we had a felting party over the phone. With my slippers in tow, I went from store to store looking for the perfect buttons. I found them, I sewed them on, and it was magic.



I am not exaggerating when I say I never took the slippers off. I don't like walking around barefoot, my feet get too cold, so through spring, summer, fall, and winter, I wore my slippers. Along the way, we met in Detroit, and I made an idiot out of myself raving to you about your pattern at the market. But in my defense, I was smitten with the slippers. I hope you didn't think I was dangerously unbalanced. I really am quite harmless.

Sadly, not all good things last forever. Around Christmas, I noticed that the soles of my feet seemed a little colder than they had in past months. I shrugged the feeling off. Certainly my feet would be colder. The house was cold. The world was cold. That's what winter is all about.

But last month, I was pulling my slippers on when I noticed a bit of fuzz on the bottom of my left slipper. I reached down and removed it. It wasn't fuzz, Melynda. It was slipper.



Indeed, the sole of my slipper had felt drafty because it had become paper-thin through excessive wear. I might have been able to save my slipper, had I examined them when my feet first felt a chill, but ignoring the problem had only caused it to grow, and now I would need all new soles to save the slippers. While I could have felted new soles and attached them, I knew the act would only prolong the life of my slippers by unnatural means. The slippers would want me to say goodbye, let them go, and move on with my life. I went back to my LYS. I found yarn, carefully selected to match the buttons from my first pair of slippers. I took the yarn back home, wound it on my new swift, and on Sunday afternoon, I started knitting.

Experience had made me wiser. Now I knew how to seam my slippers to help them felt smoothly (the process involves actually following your seaming directions instead of making up my own). I knew that a touch of hand-felting would make the tops flawless. I knew how long the straps ought to be and when to take them out of the washing machine. Armed with my knowledge, I felted them.

See?



Aren't they lovely?



(Yes, those are the same buttons.)



I know I'm not the first to tell you how amazing this pattern is, and I know this isn't the first time I've said it. Still, I have to say it again. I love these slippers.



Thank you for designing them. My feet would be much colder (not to mention less stylish) without them.

Ask Me About My New Felted Slippers!

I finished another pair of the French Press Felted Slippers last night. But I started felting them too late, so I didn't get to sleep until something like 1:30 in the morning. I had to wake up at 6:00. This after a weekend of lying in bed, waiting for sleep.

Friday night I was curled up in bed, sleepless, listening to the rush of water and gurgles from the bathroom sink. As I waited for the evil person in the bathroom to be finished, I got angrier and angrier. Didn't this person know I had to work early in the morning? And it was way late. It was like TWO in the morning. And I couldn't sleep with all that NOISE.

It sounded maybe like someone was doing THIS:



I listened to more gurgles from the sink until finally, I'd had enough. I stormed out of my room and pounded on the bathroom door.

"Just a minute," Paul replied.

Paul.

Curse the fiend! He was the one ruining my life. He would have to PAY for what he'd done. He must have filled the tub with live waterfowl, to make that kind of noise. Didn't he understand how massively cruel he was being. He was destroying my will to go on. If he wanted to keep using water, he might as well have just killed me right then and there. It would have been more merciful. Jerk.

"You need to stop waiting this late to get ready for bed," I snapped. "You woke me up with all your noise, and now I'm lying there, and I have work tomorrow. You know I can hear all the noise from the bathroom in my room. The pipes are right next to my head! It's like you're bathing an elephant in there, with all of that splashing."

"I just got in here," Paul said curtly.

"No, you didn't," I replied. "I can hear everything. I heard you getting washed up, and it WOKE ME UP. You need to stop doing this. It's getting worse and worse."

"I haven't even flushed yet!" Paul seethed.

And as I stood there, bleary-eyed, I realized he was telling the truth.

You see, I'd heard the water running for what felt like hours. And the toilet had been flushed five, maybe six times. The sink had kept gurgling and gurgling, and I was sure I'd heard the bathtub filling up.

One person would not make all of that noise.

"Oh," I said, realizing the full impact of what had just happened.

"Just give me a minute," Paul growled.

"I am so sorry," I replied.

Silence was the only reply.

"I've been lying there listening to the water," I said. "But there was no water. I dreamed it all."

More silence.

"I thought it was going on too long. And it was. Because it was a dream. I'm sorry."

I went back to bed.

You see, I have a recurring semi-nightmare of not being able to fall asleep. I remain curled in bed, panicking more and more as I worry about the next day and how exhausted I know I'll be at work. The dream, like all of my dreams, is so vivid that I fail to realize it is a dream until I wake up. Then I think, Gee, I'm pretty well rested for someone who didn't get any sleep last-- And I know that it was the same dream again.

Lately, I've been trying something called lucid dreaming. I will be lying there, thinking I'm stuck awake when I need to sleep, and as a test, I try thinking about, say, a new book from a favorite author. If the dream changes at all (like, I see the book or start dreaming about a library or something like that), I know I am actually asleep. It's like a wakeness test for Dreaming Laura. It keeps me from spending my whole night dreaming the same miserable Insomnia-Dream.

But this thing was new. It was my normal nightmare, but with water gurgling. My dream had reached a new low. And Paul was the innocent victim.

When I got back to bed, I fell asleep almost immediately. But when I woke up that morning, I started thinking about Poor Paulie. I had totally screamed at him, and for no reason at all. He was innocent. All he'd been ding was...well, using the bathroom, and I had been horrible.

Clearly, I am the worst sister in the world.

I waited patiently for Paul's normal wake-up time, and I gave him a bit more time after that to be fully conscious (we are not morning people). Then I called him and apologized again. Poor Paul. He so did not deserve my rage.

After all that, two more nights of minimal sleep were not really a good idea. But what did I care? I had a giant hole in my slipper. That had to be fixed, before I stepped on something cold, like the basement floor, and the cold surface made my foot icy cold through the fist-sized hole in the sole of my slipper. Okay. Maybe not fist-sized. But it's definitely quarter-sized. Silver dollar, maybe.

My new slippers are lovely. They're drying now. I have buttons waiting. But the whole sleep situation makes me regret felting them. I am exhausted.

I have also watched too many episodes of The Cosby Show in a row, while running up and down the basement stairs to check on the felting process. I need to buy tennis balls so I can dump them in the washing machine and speed the whole process up considerably.

Now I'm just sit here, wishing I knew how to make coffee that didn't taste like feet. I'm sure this will be worth it tomorrow, when I can pull on new comfy slippers. But right now, I'm exhausted. Knitters have demanding schedules.

My Brother's Mushroom...

Paul took Algae, Plants, and Fungi last semester, and he inspired me to knit him yet another useless novelty object. The last one was a knitted bacterium (after Microbiology). It was gram negative.

I used a modified version of this pattern which I found in a few minutes on Ravelry. It took an evening to knit up the cap and stem, though I had to do two caps because I forgot one skein of red worsted I had was superwash. Yeah.

I put them together to snap this picture right before I went to sleep:




And in the morning, I sewed them together (next time, I will be using the hot-glue gun; it won't make a difference).

Since I didn't have a felting needle (nor could I drive to any yarn store and buy one without devoting an entire day to the two hour drive there, the two hour drive back, and the questions: "Will Stitches and Scones be open when I get there?" and "Does Stitches and Scones even have a felting needle?"

So I went to the local Wal-mart and had another fragment of my soul sucked out as I purchased buttons that were tiny and white, the right color for this specific species of mushroom.

So there you are. Now it is sitting in my brother's filthy dorm room, amidst the dust, which is where other species of fungi are growing right now. This is more colorful, though.