MJs on my feet

Hey, remember when I said I wasn’t going to do anything else (besides the dishcloths) until I’d sorted out my hibernating projects? Yeah, well, um, so I went to visit a friend the other day, and she had this pattern, see, and then we found ourselves at the craft store, and then before I knew it I was buying yarn and needles for a project I didn’t even know I wanted to knit. And there you go. Lovely little Mary Jane slippers to pad around the house in (when it gets cooler). I have a stripey pair that a friend gave me ages ago, but I’ve always wanted to make a pair (or several) so that I wouldn’t be heart broken when those inevitably wear out.

I had to re-write the pattern myself, since the pattern she downloaded had so many mistakes. I think it may have been a combination of a couple of mistakes combined with my misunderstanding of some of the pattern directions. In the end it was easier and faster to just do the whole thing myself. I didn’t like a couple of the choices the pattern writer had made, and so did things my way.

The sole and the upper are knit separately, then pieced together, and the strap is knit from picking up stitches on one side and grafting them onto the other. It’s pretty straight forward. Whenever I’m making something that has to be pieced together, I slip the first stitch of every row, which gives you a lovely chain selvedge. It is also helpful on exposed edges, because you get a nice clean line of chain stitches around the edge of the piece.

One was pieced together using Kitchener Stitch mattress stitch to make the seams, wrong sides together. The other was piece together with a crochet chain stitch, right sides together. The former looks better on the sides of the slipper, but neither method looks nice at the toe and heel, where the increases and decreases make seaming a little uneven looking. The latter, however, is much faster. Since these aren’t really “show off” pieces, I think I’d opt for the crochet seams over the sewn seams any day.
These don’t really match, because I was experimenting with the pattern as I went along. I must have knit and reknit the pieces so many times as I modified the pattern. If I had just knit them in one go, I think this project would have taken about 5 hours to complete, and that’s being quite generous with the time. A great weekend project.

Knit on size 7/4.5mm needles, I used Patons Classic Wool in grey. Cheap and soft.