Felting Fun!

So I have a crafty friend here in Minneapolis (crafty like innovative, artistic, as opposed to crafty-sneaky). She's a knitter. And somehow that statement doesn't really do her justice. She's nutty about knitting. Her name is Shelly and she knit me these cool socks for my birthday.


Now I know even the non-knitterly types out there are thinking, wow, those are cool socks. They are, and they're comfy too and fit like a glove. Anyhoo.

I was taught to knit by my grandmother when I was a girl, though I must say that only a handful of the projects I've started have actually reached completion. Let's just say that there's a sweater in my knitting bag for my niece Safiya. Which I started before she was born. And she's going to be 7 this year. ANYHOO.

Inspired by Shelly's keen enthusiasm and willingness to tutor me, I took on a short and simple project this time: socks that self-stripe (don't ask me how that works, Ozayr and I are still baffled.) Here are the socks... or rather sock.


Now I am being honest here. It's taken me at least 6 months to get this far. And I'm not even on the heel of the first sock yet. But I do enjoy it! I enjoy taking it out and doing a few stitches here and there. It's going slowly. Granted.

One day about 2 weeks ago Maymuna looked at me and asked in her sweetest, sweetest voice, "Mommy could you please knit me some slippers like Julie's?" Shelly's daughter Julie has some awesome felted clogs that Maymuna was seriously coveting. Oh man, how could I resist such a sweet request? And she said it with the hugest brown eyes EVER.

So as you can imagine, when I asked Shelly for the pattern for the clogs I was very nearly laughed out of my own living room. But next came the incredibly nice part: she offered to knit them for me. Half of me was mortified, oh my god, I hope she doesn't think I was trying to get her to do this for me. The other half of me was like, SCORE!!! I accepted her offer and Maymuna got to choose the colours she wanted and everything. She chose hot pink and orange, with green for the soles (a colour combination only a 3 year old can get away with, I think.)

We went to dinner at Shelly's house last night and lo and behold, they were finished! They look huge in this picture, because they are - Maymuna and I got to take them home and felt them ourselves in the washing machine.


Basically you just keep washing them until they shrink to a perfect fit. It only took one hot wash in with the towels to do the trick... Here is Maymuna wearing them. I was pretty sure they were still kind of damp, but she insisted that they were dry enough to wear...


Well, that was such a great little project... and so easy! (oh yeah, I didn't do any of the work... right...)

I just wanted to say thanks! merci! danke! shukran! xie xie! to Shelly for knitting the clogs - Maymuna loves them.

Just a little note - this is the 100th post on the blog! Woo-hoo! I am still enjoying it, I hope you are too!