Felting Project 1, The Gateway Activity

You heard it here first. I have made my first pair of shoes, albeit slippers. The die is cast. I will learn to make shoes. Here are a few pictures from the workshop I attended. It was taught by a very bright young woman, Sarah Breggin who really knows and loves her craft. Sarah sells her tutorials via Etsy, and works as a programmer when she is not teaching felting at Burkeland Bros Wool in Abbottsford.

We started with 8 little piles of fleece.

 Each pile is flattened over the template.

 

The templates, left and right now covered in 4 layers of fleece and ready to be decorated.

 

The design gets laid on top of the fleece block and then gets slowly worked in as the felting begins.

 

Serious felting begins, slowly binding the fibers together. 

Rolling the slippers up helps shrink the fibers, first length, then width.

I can't tell you enough how important this little outing was for me. I have had this frustration with shoes rolling around in my mind for as long as I've had feet. I seriously feel that this could prove to be the activity that leads me to my ultimate goal of owning a pair of shoes that not only fit my "larger foot type" but somehow compliments my particular sense of style, whatever that is. I honestly can't point to a woman's shoe and say, there, that is the shoe, the shoe that will make me whole, as I suspect other women can. I stopped thinking about women's shoes around size 10, at size 14 I have no hope of wearing women's shoes unless I want to look like a transvestite, a risk I am not willing to take. It can't be denied there is a gender sensitivity attached to shoes. At a certain age my brother and I wore the same shoes and he suffered for it via verbal suggestions that he was wearing girls shoes. What I knew was, I was wearing my brothers shoes, a decidedly non-feminine act. I would like to deny it's importance but I would be lying if I told you I didn't care. I want to feel feminine in my shoes. (I just threw up in my mouth a little re-reading that.) To hell with it, I am that person, woman, girl, longing to be girly, womanly, whatever, not just some facsimile in Kenneth Coles that pass as sensible shoes for a woman of a certain size and professional acumen. They're not flirty, unless you're Italian and a male homosexual. I want flirty. I don't need 4 inch heels, I want soft. I want unique. I want my own goddamn shoes.