Buzzkill

I have made many things for the people I love. Mittens, blankets, sweaters, animals, etc. I am fortunate to have a family that not only embraces my handmade items...they ask for more. So it's really a shocker when something gets...well...I'm just going to come out and say it...rejected.

Owlie when he was just finished. He's little bear's favorite

Flashback to last January. Below zero temperatures, wood floors, little feet. The situation was just screaming for cute toddler slippers. And, as luck would have it, I had been eyeballing this adorable pattern by Bekah Knits for quite some time. I ran out to a local yarn shop and purchased what I needed to cast-on. (I ended up choosing Spud & Chloe for this project. It is such a workhorse yarn and washes up like a dream.)

Since the slippers would be toddler-sized, I figured that I could get 2 pair of slippers done in a weekend. Yeah, right.

One of the truly great things about the finished slippers is that, when knitted with the Spud & Chloe yarn on the smaller needles required for this pattern, the resulting fabric is seriously thick and dense. These slippers are built to last. Unfortunately, the process of knitting that firmer fabric made my hands get really sore (not usually a problem for me) so I could only knit on them for a little while before I needed to take a break. Needless to say, this made it impossible to finish quickly and it ended up taking me a month to get them done.

But, I am a loyal soldier in the handmade army. Deep in the trenches of the never-ending toddler slippers and I was going to come out victorious...by hook or by crook. So I pressed on and finished them. The blocking was also a slow because they took days and days to dry due to their thickness. (Pro tip: I stuffed them with cotton socks to shape them during the blocking.) Eventually they were finished. And they turned out pretty darn cute, if I do say so myself!

Slipper-y cuteness.

Of course, I popped them on my three year old to get some photos for my Ravelry page right away. As soon as they were on his feet, he gets riled up and starts running...wood floor....slippery knit bottoms...you get the picture. Luckily, I had seen a solution for this problem addressed by another knitter on Ravelry. She had put stripes of fabric puff-paint as treads to give the bottoms some traction. I did it too. Awesomeness. Here is my finished project ravelry link.

Detail of the puff-paint traction.

So, at this point, I was feeling pretty good - the long knitting process was done and the technical kinks worked out. There would be no more cold, little feet in our house! Or so I thought...

Yeah, neither of the kids will keep them on their feet for more than 5 minutes. I kept them in the living room, trying to coax someone into them here and there for about a month. Eventually, I gave up and put the rejected slippers in the kids' closets. All that trouble for naught. The only saving grace is that it's not as painful to have your work rejected by a toddler. Maybe next fall they will have a change of heart. :)

–Cassandra