It is all Fiona‘s fault that I have developed an unfortunate obsession with knitting garter stitch slippers. It all started with her posts about her husband’s slippers, and a link to a pattern (in Finnish), where you knit a strip of 6 squares, then knit two squares onto the side of this strip, do a spot of origami, sew it together and voila! a slipper. It all looked intriguing so I made a little model in paper first to see how it worked (my Finnish is not too hot so I was relying on the pictures).

Looking at the picture I kept thinking that I am sure it could be worked so that you knitted the seams together as you were working, and so wouldn’t have to do any sewing up. So I gamely cast on, having no idea how many stitches I should use so I used 18, the same as Fiona, and used 3.5mm needles, again the same as Fiona, and some shetland 4ply weight yarn doubled. However I think I am a tighter knitter than Fiona, and although the principal worked, indeed there are no seams, it is a bit small for my foot, and also the heel is considerably pointier than my heel.

So I measured my foot, and thought I could amalgamate two of the squares to give a squarer heel, so one and a half squares measured diagonally would be the length of the foot. In all my little calculations (I used Pythagora’s theorem and everything) I failed to take into account that because knitting is stretchy and my feet aren’t actually square that I should have made the slippers shorter than my foot length. So here is the yeti slipper.

And just for scale, all three slippers together.

Intellectual curiosity satisfied. Luckily I think I have got this out of my system now since I need more slippers like I need a hole in the head.