After you do the math, what comes next? why, the aftermath, of course.

Can’t call it a post-mortem ‘cos the victim ain’t dead. Let’s just say… performance assessment.

But first of all, let me say this. In my original post on Archie I had to bastardize this line from “Walking Happy” to make it apply to socks, but now I get to quote it verbatim:

        Boots is what makes the business,
        and I am what makes the boots.
 

Yes! I! made! boots!

What part of this did I not anticipate? It’s not like I didn’t know about the magic of felting, that it would somehow alchemically transmute a flabby flappy object into a compact little marvel. I did know that; I took it into account. I designed them as boots. I intended them to be boots. I knew they were destined to become boots. But now here they are in front of me, standing up all by themselves and everything, just like real boots, because… they ARE boots! I’m here to tell you - planning boots is one thing, but HAVING boots is totally totally another. I am idiotically pleased with myself, not to mention amused. For all their flaws in design and execution (and as you will shortly see I am, I trust, the first to recognize those, and will be quick to remedy them), there is no getting around the fact that makes me giggly and giddy and grinny: hee-hee, I made boots.

I made boots. I made boots. I made boots.

Boots. This is very very cool. And also, just a little silly.

And now - down to business. What worked, what didn’t.

The Infernal Machine

When I embarked on this little felting adventure yesterday I set up a whole cutesy little demi-noir photo-shoot - pictures of my cup of coffee, my big towel, my bowl of soapy water, blah blah blah. Well, hmph. Forget that. Here’s the thing: I felted my first series of swatches for these by machine, but after that I fell into the habit of hand-felting. See, my washing machine is down in the bowels of my unfinished-and-not-always-completely-dry basement, and as the number of swatches climbed toward the umpteenty-jillion mark all that trotting up and down stairs and waiting for cycles got old pretty quickly. Patience? Ha. Instant gratification is almost fast enough for my taste. And, as I thought, hand-felting was working out just fine. I certainly got a plenty dense fulled fabric and - obviously - a pretty accurate shrinkage gauge.

But were the results really representative? In the event… nope, not exactly. Yesterday I quickly discovered that, efficient though it may be for little swatches, hand-felting a great big floppy knitted object is after all much slower and messier and more labor-intensive than a quick cycle through the machine. So I threw in the towel - and also the pillowcase containing the soggy sock-objects - and in no time flat I had my answer. This is GOOD, overall, because I suspect most people who make Swan Lake in future will also felt it by machine. The good news: it machine-felts like a dream. One short cycle and - poof! Boots! The not-so-good news: my machine is more violent and powerful than most, and of course I realize that machines vary, as do hands - nevertheless, the cute felted-lace effect that I got from hand-felting my swatches?

Bye-bye, sayonara, down the drain, gone. After a run through the machine the (former) eyelets were just barelybarelybarely visible on Odette - on Odile they were altogether lost.

Solution? Lemon ==> lemonade. What the eye can’t see the fingers can still feel, so I did a kind of Braille embroidery, using what was left of the holes as guides for the design. (I felt my way, don’t you know. Sorry. Not.) I then hand-felted it a little to make it blend in better (these are NOT cowboy boots, after all…), and I quite like the way it came out.

Possibilities for the next pair: I could get the lace effect back by threading something unfeltable through the eyelets before felting; but on consideration I think I like the fact that the front of the shin is not ventilated (that being, after all, the spot most sensitive to cold and most typically neglected by run of the mill slippers). So instead I’m testing a way to achieve a similar embroidery effect starting at the pre-felting stage. Funny thing: Jennifer proves right yet again. No matter how hard I tried to redraw this motif so it would look like lace, she persisted in thinking it was a design in grey yarn. Guess what? Turns out, it is.

Fit and Comfort

The great miracle: yes, they felted to size. But do they really fit? Overall, yes; perfectly, no. We’re OK for general ratio and scale. Now it’s a matter of fine-tuning for ease and detail. Felt being less pliable and elastic and forgiving than knitted fabric, I built extra ease into the instep and ankle - the former to avoid constricting the foot during wear, the latter to ensure that the boot could be put on without the heel getting stuck on the way. These were both good ideas, but I overshot the mark. The felt has more give in it than I feared, so the ease turned out overgenerous. There’s a little bit of pooching-out at the arch/instep, and a slightly floppy feel to the fit. The felt, while nice and solid and dense, is in fact so forgiving that at the next round I’m going to go the other way with the ankle and nip it in a touch just above the heel, slightly echoing the original drawing.

Just a touch, no more; so they won’t slip down-at-heel or let in too much air above the ankle. And I’ll cut way back on the ease at the instep - way way back. I want a sleeker silhouette, one that glides instead of waddling.

I’m also going to “split” the sole. I had come up with this really cool scheme for a reinforced texture on the sole, and I’m happy to say it worked out gangbusters. Not really much more dense than the rest of the fabric, but just enough to feel noticeably solid and cushy underfoot. But for the next round I gotta betta idea still: I’ll use the same texture, but within different contours. I’m going to copy the sole structure of my favorite ballet shoes (made by Grishko; Bloch and Sansha do something similar but it’s not as well-designed), which split the business part of the sole into the two places where it’s really needed - i.e. under the heel and under the tarsus/metatarsus - leaving the center/arch flexible and unencumbered.

I think this too will make for a smoother, cozier, more graceful fit. After all, despite all my jumping up and down and all my popping of champagne corks, these aren’t really BOOT boots, not in the structural-supportive-sole sense - from a practical standpoint they are slippers, and should feel like such. You wanna be able to walk around in them (I’m getting reinforcing rubbery stuff to paint on the soles), but you also wanna be able to curl up in them. Don’t need all that extra real estate underfoot.

Aesthetics

They look good. They could look better.

Colors: As discussed earlier, the grey is lighter than I intended; I do like it but I think that for production purposes we’re going to go for something a bit darker. We are definitely going for a deeper, redder orange. As Terry pointed out the other day, REAL black swans have much darker beaks. Of course, these aren’t real swans by a long shot; real black swan beaks don’t have grey bands and do have white tips - nor do real swans have columns of lace/embroidery above their heads (or does EVERYBODY but me think of that part as the neck?). These are idealized swans, fantasy swans, maidens enchanted into swan guise, and as Terry mentioned this morning the whole plot turns on the fact that they are also identical twins, possibly even the light and dark sides of the same personality. So it doesn’t bother me that they are not perfectly anatomically correct; to me it is more important that they look alike and yet different, that they express the dichotomy inherent in the theme. ON THE OTHER HAND… it’s funny how real data has a way of changing one’s coding specs. The color Jennifer made for me is very faithful to the color I sketched and the color I thought I wanted, and I continued to think so right up until I put it on my feet and stood up and looked down and said, hey wait a minute, who let Donald Duck in here? So we’re going for something a little deeper and more sophisticated.

Shapes: The bands need to be a lot pointier toward the back. I drew them that way, and I knew they looked too shallow when I knitted them - but for complicated reasons involving the relationship between vertical and lateral shrinkage ratios I thought the felting would compensate for that. For the same complicated reasons, it turns out I was wrong. So the bands will be knitted pointier and deeper, the rows shorter, the heels correspondingly re-engineered -

- and the eyes will be smaller. I don’t think I’m actually going to make them round (let alone red) as they would be in the real birds (see above re enchanted maidens, etc.), but they could definitely stand to be a bit less obtrusive. I’m sheepishly unsure how they got so big in the first place - I think they just growed, like Topsy. I’m sure I had nothing to do with it….

Height: Now that I’ve seen how well they felt, I’m considering the possibility of making them taller - i.e. the full five pattern reps on the shin as drawn instead of the four dictated by Fear of Felting. Then again, I need to weigh what this would do to the cost of the kit - it’s already a pretty high-yardage item. (On the other foot hand, if the ankle is narrower to begin with, it may not make too much difference.) More swatching, weighing, and thinking ahead.

- - - - - - - - - - - - -

So - I’d say I have my work cut out for me.

Still and all - and even before everything is said and done and felted - I MADE BOOTS!

        HURRAY!
 

P.S. A Happy Burns Nicht, all… and don’t get me started about my Haggis experiences.

P.P.S. Hey… did I tell you I made boots?

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 25th, 2007 at 10:45 pm and is filed under Swan Lake, Felting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.