Knitted and felted clogs

Over the past few days I've been working on a pair of knitted and felted clogs. When you knit something for felting, it has to be made BIG because it shrinks during the felting process.

 

So here are what the knitted clogs looked like when I had finished knitting them:

 

 

They were huge!:

 

 

But I wasn't worried. I've felted things before. So I tossed my huge, floppy, knitted clogs into the wash. It took maybe just under an hour for them to reach the right size - you have to keep checking on them every 5-10 minutes to keep an eye on how they're felting, and to catch them when they're the right fit.

 

You can see that they are now the right size. They're stuffed with plastic bags so that they keep their shape while drying:



 

 

They can be worn like this, but I'm going to sew leather slipper soles to them so they won't be slippery, and for extra wear. I'm really happy with them:

 

 

The brown tops were knitted with alpaca yarn, and the gray soles and rims were knitted with a natural gray/brown Romney wool.

 

The alpaca yarn was from one of the first raw fleeces that I ever washed and processed into yarn. The Romney wool was spun from some roving that I purchased at a fiber festival and knew that someday I would make slippers with.

 

I hope these are as comfy as they look. My current pair of felted slippers are a few years old and need to retire. These are the replacements.