Unplugged project - clothing

I've been intending to join the unplugged project for a few weeks now. We finally got around to it this week albeit a little bit late. Hopefully in a couple of weeks we'll be in sync with all the other participants. For more information about this project, go to unplug your kids.

Last summer I made Percy some felted slippers and recently Sarah and Bill have been asking for some too. So when I saw that this weeks unplugged theme was clothing I immediately ordered the merino wool in Sarah and Bill's chosen colours.

Making Bill's slippers: to make the template, Sarah drew around Bill's feet, then I drew a line around it, rounding it off and enlarging it by about an inch all round. I drew two lines up to make a boot shape then cut out a template using a plastic placemat. Meanwhile Sarah decided to make a pair of slippers for one of their Power Rangers!

I then started to lay the wool over the template. On the first layer we lay the fibres running from left to right then on the next layer we positioned the fibres running from top to bottom. I repeated this so that we had four layers making sure that each layer was about 1 inch larger than the template. Then we dampened the wool with some hot, soapy water to press the fibres to gether before carefully lifting the template and wool up and turning it so the the wool was now on the table (on top of a towel, beach mat and bubble wrap). Next, I folded the excess wool over the sides of the template then repeated the above process.

Next I covered the wool with a net curtain and massaged the wool through the curtain. When the wool appeared to be felting I removed the curtain and rolled the wool covered template in the the bubble wrap and beach mat and rolled backwards continuously, only stopping to move the template around in different directions.

I then cut through the wool and template to separate the slippers and continued to roll them a few more times.

Then I started on Sarah's slippers. At some point the children decided that their Power Rangers and dolls needed rugs and blankets, so this is what they were doing:

And the end results:

For some reason neither of the two pairs of slippers that I made yesterday felted as well as Percy's (in the middle). I'll have to find an experienced felter to ask where I'm going wrong. Nonetheless, we had fun and I'm still reasonably pleased with the results. If you want to try making these slippers, I used this pattern and from there you can link to the method.

The next theme for the unplugged project is bottle, due to be blogged on Monday.