40th Anniversary Slippers

This year marked my parents' 40th wedding anniversary. In anticipation of this (as well as the surrounding holidays of Mother's Day, Father's Day and my mom's birthday), I decided a joint gift was in order. Now to put my choice of slippers into perspective, I thought a little back story is in order.

When I first learned to knit, my entire family received a scarf and a pair of booties for Christmas that year. The booties I re-engineered from a pattern that my friend's grandma would crank out for their family (of which I was also the recipient of the abundance of booties). I made these out of Lion Brand Homespun. Now, the obvious problem was that they instantly grew and flopped around as soon as you wore them for more than about 10 minutes and it was really only a matter of time before the holes started showing up. Consequently, they were largely abandoned by myself and my family members...except my Dad. He babied his pair. He even had me add a tie to the ankle to help keep them on and would routinely, over the course of the next few years, provide ideas about ways they could be armored to lengthen their lifespan. What he needed was a pair of felted clogs.

By looking at yardage requirements, I discovered that if I used Cascade 220 and flip-flopped the color combinations of their slippers, I could cut the amount of yarn I needed to buy by about a 1/3. I ended up picking out 9428 (sage) and 9426 (forest green). By the time the knitting was done, I used about 2.6 hanks of each color. One thing that was interesting, is that the dye for the forest green yarn didn't seem to be set very well and I ended up with green fingers every time I knit with it. (It also stained my Denise Needles.) I had never heard of anyone having trouble with the color-fastness of 220 and I don't have particularly sweaty hands, so who knows!

Now given that these are certainly far from a seldom-made knitting pattern, I'll spare too many details, since you've all probably made them already anyway. But I will say that the pattern is awesome, completely insane and wonderful all at the same time. How she thought up this pattern is beyond me! In fact, I still don't think my Dad understands that I knit them the good 'ol way. He thought that they must have been from some kind of kit because he said "they're constructed!" Hee, hee.

Now the knitting did take me awhile because I haven't been able to knit all that much lately, so I had to space them out, but when I did work on them, they flew off the needles. The most annoying part of this process was attaching the soles. That just sucked. But I knew it was worth it and something my parents would both appreciate given the large quantity of tile in their house.

So all in all this process was a success and they both really liked their slippers...and of course B wants a pair now too!