The FOlio: The Cookie Monster Slippers (my very first knitting project)
In the FOlio, I reflect on a finished knitting object and what the process of knitting it taught me.
Pattern : Unknown slipper pattern from a “Learn to Knit” booklet circa the early 1980s (I have tried but have been unable to find a slipper pattern constructed completely flat the way this one was).
Designer: Unknown
Yarn Used : Some very old bright blue acrylic from the 1980s
Knit from : roughly winter 1998-99.
Lesson: If you want to learn to knit, you don’t have to start knitting perfectly, you just have to start.
If you follow me on social media you may have seen that I am now running WLS Makes Stuff full-time! This is something I’ve been working towards for about three years now if you just count how long I have been seriously pursuing a career as a knitting tech editor – but I really started over 25 years ago when I first picked up a pair of knitting needles. As I move into this new stage of my knitting journey, I thought it was a good time to talk about the very first project I ever knit and how that experience has shaped how I think about knitting ever since.
I come from a family of crafters. Both my grandmothers sewed, and my mom and her sisters loved to take on various sewing, drawing, cross-stitching and whatever other craft projects they got interested in.
You may see something important missing from that list.
No one in my family was really a knitter. In the early 80’s my mom taught herself to knit with a learn to knit book that featured very basic patterns, and successfully knit several family members slippers, and my aunt a striped sweater, before being stumped by an intarsia child’s sweater pattern. Back in those days, pattern books assumed if you picked up an intarsia colorwork sweater pattern you knew how to knit intarsia and so they didn’t explain anything about the technique; my mom never could figure out how to change colors and keep the yarn connected and she couldn’t find anyone to explain what she was doing wrong. She ended up giving up and instead got very into cross-stitch (this was back in the peak era of cross-stitching motifs on clothing and household goods with waste canvas).
I picked up cross-stitching as well in high school and was still doing quite a bit of it when I went to college. But college was the first time I spent hours a day on a computer screen (and additional hours reading books for class) and my already terrible eyesight was suffering. Cross-stitching in my leisure time just added to the strain and fatigue. I needed a new hobby that would allow me to make stuff while my eyes got a break.
My mom offered me the bag of old knitting supplies she’d stashed away a decade earlier, including the very 80’s pattern book. She recommended the knit slippers, which were an unusual construction, knit flat in one piece starting at one side of the cuff, working down one side to the middle of the sole and then back up again and seamed down the middle front and back of the ankles*. Although an odd choice for a first project, it really was a great beginner pattern because you very quickly learned knits, purls, increases and decreases (and since it was a beginner book these were explained with detailed diagrams). However, this is where we both learned that I was an incredibly tight knitter and while forcing my needles through my extremely tight loops I kept splitting the (extremely cheap and over a decade old) yarn. I also failed to check how many stitches were on my needles until I got to the end of the increases.
“Well,” said my mom, when we realized how many stitches I’d added halfway through, “you can either start over or try to match this new number on the second slipper.”
These days, I’d probably knit it again (although also these days I am extremely vigilant about double checking my stitch count mid-project, entirely due to this first experience). But I was so excited to have a pair of hand-knit slippers and the thought of having to start all over was not appealing. (My hands were also really tired because I was knitting so tight – although I still knit tighter than average I did learn soon after this project to loosen up my grip and make knitting more comfortable.) So I did my best to match the extra stitches I had added. And initially, this seemed to work!
The finished slippers. I definitely managed to match the size, at least.
Although unorthodox, trying to match my accidental increase was a crash course in reading my knitting – since I had to look for increase rows in the first slipper and then count how many stitches were in that row. It also taught me my first lesson in how altering one part of a knitting pattern can cause something to change, although I didn’t realize this right away. Because I was increasing more stitches than called for in the pattern, I then was trying to decrease back to the actual number of ankle cuff stitches. I thought this was easy because the decrease instructions read “decrease one stitch on each end every X number of rows until there were Y stitches remaining.” But what I didn’t realize was that meant I was also adding additional rows to get from my too big increase back to the original decrease number.
I didn’t realize it, that is, until I went to put on the finished slippers and the feet were massive.
(Above: the extra space in the heel of the slipper (yes, my foot is actually in the slipper in the left side pic), and a comparison of the slipper on my foot to one of my current sneakers)
The finished slippers fit snugly around the ankles, but were both too long and too wide by *several* inches. I instantly christened them my Cookie Monster slippers, due to the bright blue floppy monster feet they gave me when worn. I ended up leaving them at my parents’ house as backup slippers when I’d come home in the winter – they weren’t terrible to walk around in (unless I moved too quickly and stepped on the extra fabric of the other foot), but they were definitely not going to be a cherished part of my wardrobe.
These days, I think that such a massive fail in my first knitting project was really useful – I have spent the last 25 years never being afraid to try new patterns in knitting because there’s always a way to fix it (although I also learned that the *easy* way to fix it is not always the one you want to take). Did this mean that a lot of my early projects turned out kind of wonky because I tackled a project that I didn’t fully understand how to knit properly? Definitely. But my skills also grew a lot faster because they were constantly challenged. And I still make mistakes as a knitter all the time - I just am a little faster at catching them before I get to the finished object (I’m also more willing to frog a project and start over if I can tell I’m not going to be able to fix it to my liking — see the Fox Paws Scarf.)
I am in a knitting group now with many knitters who have only been knitting for a few years, and when they are frustrated trying to pick up a new technique or a new type of pattern, I have sometimes used my slippers story as an example of how massively I have failed as a knitter. You do not have to start knitting perfectly immediately if you want to take up knitting – you just have to start.
What was your first knitting project? Also have you ever seen a slipper pattern knit fully flat like this one? (Seriously, I would love to track that pattern down and I haven’t been able to.)