(No) Slip sliding away

Doesn’t sound like I’m about to introduce you to my new blue cardigan, does it? Well, you’re right. I’m not. Mr. Gren has been working a lot of evenings lately, so hasn’t been around to take any pictures for me. My next option would be to let Granota do it since Rana’s at school, but … she’s 4. Any photographs she takes tend to have an abstract vibe.

So instead, I’ll show you what I whipped up on Friday!

A couple of years ago, my sister-in-law got the girls little soft fleece slippers for Christmas. They loved them and wore them. And loved them. And wore them. To death do them part. I finally felt bad seeing those raggedy little things on their feet and Granota’s toes poking through the end and decided to do something about it. I’m not sure where SIL got the slippers, but I have plenty of fleece scraps and decided to just make some new ones myself. How hard could it be?

There are approximately 63.75 internet tutorials on how to make little slippers like this, all of them seemed to be for baby sizes, though. I studied the shapes of the pattern pieces and decided to just try my best to replicate that. First things first, I traced around Granota’s foot and based the rest of my pattern from there.

“Pattern” may be best interpreted loosely because, although I added a little bit of wearing ease and a seam allowance, the slippers still turned out decidedly narrow. Lucky for me, I have a little boy with very narrow feet and, doubly lucky for me, that first pair of slippers wasn’t in girly colors.

Konik models his new slippers that he will probably never wear because he insists on shoes at all times.

Take 2 involved adding even more ease and a larger seam allowance until the resultant newspaper pattern was a grotesquely large version of Granota’s little feet. I was dubious, but trial and error on the first go-round had already proved to be Error, so I may as well proceed with the new “pattern.” I have plenty of fleece scraps, so that was of no concern to me. However, the grippy fabric (which I had forgotten to list in my thrift store finds from last week) was more limited. It turned out to be enough and this second pair of slippers, while still not perfect, did fit the girl and I only had to use the seam ripper 3 times. Of course, once Rana got home from school and saw that her siblings had new slippers, she demanded new ones, which I knew she would. With slightly more slipper-making knowledge under my belt, I traced her foot and set to work. I think each pair of slippers ended up taking about an hour to make and there’s possibly enough grippy fabric left to make one more small pair. Not a bad day’s work.

Granota (right) and Rana (left) show off their new slippers.

The kids are happy, but I have to admit that it really wasn’t a very enjoyable day for me. I really dislike fudging around and making multiples of the same object to finally settle on one that is closest to my vision. I much prefer to have a clean, workable pattern where somebody else has already taken all that time to measure, experiment, etc. What about you? Be it sewing, crochet, cooking, fixing a car, whatever — do you like the tinkering process or do you prefer to have things already mapped out so that you can dive headlong into it?