Not very long ago I taught a felt slipper workshop. There were 6 students including Jan. Here is the set-up in my guilds classroom It holds 6 tables reasonably well. You can see the table looms waiting for class on the left.

           

After we discussed the different styles of slippers, everyone traced their foot and sized up to make their template. We used floor underlay for the templates.

          

Everyone laid out both sides of their resist and got them nicely wrapped around

Then started embellishing them

Then it was time for felting. Start gently with some rubbing

       

Then rolling. No rolling pictures, you would think with everyone busy rolling I would have lots of time to take pictures but I guess I was too busy talking.

then more rubbing to heal the cut and on to fulling and shaping

And don’t forget to try them on to see where they need more work and in which directions. I brought new bread bags so they could try their slippers on without getting wet feet or socks.

Getting there

Here are some of the finished slippers.

 

Now you are probably thinking that at the top I said Jan was in the class but I haven’t seen her. Well, that is because Jan is the problem child of the class. She can’t just do what everyone else wants to do, and so she gets a section all of her own. Jan wants boot-style slippers. Ok, that’s no problem and you are wondering what’s the problem with that?  Well, she wants really tall rear entry boot, style “slippers”.

I had her come to class early so we would have time to discuss the how of making rear entry extra tall slippers. She says they are slippers and not boots.  You can see Jan’s diagram of what she wants in the first picture. I was explaining how the resists would work. This was best explained with a mini paper example.

Jan’s foot pattern and then her mane resist drawn out.

 

Jan started laying out wool about the same time as the others but she had much more wool and resist to cover.

she did a lot of rubbing but I didn’t get a picture of that and then she started rolling. By the end of class, the slippers had started to felt well but were not up to fulling yet. So now the next step is for her to visit me over the holidays and finish the slippers. I think this means I need to sweet-talk one of my men to bring the dryer into the studio. I am not sure where it got stored. I am sure letting the dryer do some of the manual work is a good idea. Maybe we can work on the dinosaur bag while it rolls around and around. These slippers should be good for sorting out what needs to be tweaked to make some more solid boots. These are Corriedale but we would both like to make some good boots out of Finnish wool. Have you made booths? What wool did you use?

As a measure of how much effort and concentration went into these, Jan only had about 20 or so pictures to share with me. All the pictures of Jan’s work are hers except the last one of Jan rolling.

Wishing Everyone a Very Happy Holiday Season!