First up, Chris has managed to get out of India and is now based back in Melbourne. He came home on leave for a few weeks over Xmas and was feeling the cold, even though the weather in Wellington was pretty darn good if I say so myself!
Anyhoo, Pat took pity on Chris' blue feet and lent him his felted clogs. This resulted in one happy Chris with toasty warm toes. So, I decided to get stuck in and make Chris a pair of his own, even though I had sworn vehemently that I would never make anything felted ever again after the crazy measures I had to go to to get Pat's clogs to felt. I didn't quite finish Chris' before he left to go back to Melbourne for work, but I came close. Once the knitting was finished I decided I'd try to avoid the frustrations I experienced whilst felting Pat's clogs and did a bit of research, the upshot of which was that I discovered that lighter coloured wools don't always felt very quickly because the bleaching needed to achieve the lighter colour affects how the wool reacts during the felting process.
AH HA!!! Maybe that's why Pat's took soooo long ...
Felting day arrived and I prepared to go to war, following all of the suggestions I had come across in my reading -
* Put item in a pillowcase
* Use a hot wash
* Use a low water setting
* Use towels or jeans to aid agitation
* Check felting progress every 5-10 minutes
and then slowly over the next hour I abandoned or augmented nearly all of them -
* Take item OUT of the pillowcase so they bash around more in the machine
*Turn the cold feed to machine off, discover water is still not hot enough, so boil kettle 10 million times and add to the machine - ad nauseam
* Use low water setting
* Remove towels until only one remains
*Check felting progress sporadically at first as nothing happens - but DON'T get complacent as I discovered that the clogs went from Shrek size to Tinkerbell size VERY fast when I got the combination of temperature, agitation and water level correct.
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