I have been working on some slippers… with long breaks in between activity… for such a long time! They came of some polwarth fibre that was not promising enough for fine spinning and that I thought would be best rendered into felt. This is my go-to classic felting pattern, Bev Galeskas’ Fibertrends Clog pattern. If you’re a regular around here you know by now that I have made many dozens of them. I still think this pattern is genius… but I am a little bit over it just at present, personally. Anyway… some of these pairs had already suffered the indignity of being unsuccessfully dipped into indigo. Time to try again! I decided to pre-wet for evenness for once in my life.
Finally, the time came for unnatural dyeing. I have two burners, and four pairs of slippers. They’re big! I decided to exhaust the dye and re-use the water on the second round of dyeing, which worked well. It seemed a perfect opportunity to try this strategy out–after all, I am dyeing over chocolate brown wool for the most part. Fine details of colour are not of real moment.
Finally, I give you purple over brown, green over brown, red-brown-black (using up the leftovers of dyeing adventures past) and blue over brown.
Sadly I’ll not be able to hand them over in person but I can’t bear to make my friends wait any longer! We have had unseasonably cold weather here of late, and credibility on the question of whether they will ever see these slippers must be stretched to a very fine thread already! So I am going to give them to a mutual friend who I am hoping will be happy to drop them in to warm chilly toes at the next opportunity.
Local & Bespoke 