Don’t be fooled, I have been doing some bookbinding this week but I’m saving the show-and-tell of books for later. This post is all about something I did for fun.
Yesterday I made some slippers for my teddy bears. Yes, you heard that right! Let’s skip over the fact that I’m clearly way too attached to my bears, and get to the point.
One of the gifts I received over Christmas was this fabulous book (from Sarah of Vintage Retro Kitsch), Everything Alice by Hannah Read-Baldrey and Christine Leech. It’s packed full of projects inspired by (surprise surprise) Alice in Wonderland, and when I was thumbing through it for the first time this project in particular caught my eye.
Red King Slippers. Now, I don’t need any slippers for myself but I did really want to make some, which is where the bears came into this. The pattern itself is pretty straightforward, as you can see:
The instructions tell you to enlarge the patten by a certain percentage, but that for a proper fit you should draw around the foot of the slipper wearer and enlarge the templates os the sole matches the outline of the foot. All well and good for humans, but bears have differently shaped feet (they’re round and very plump, and are completely disproportionate to the ankle size of the bear in question). A bit of a challenge then!
In the end, after much mucking about with paper templates and a couple of failed attempts at slippers (too small, and then too big), I finally got the size right. I also changed the stitching a bit near the top so that instead of blanket stitch I used a loose stitch (don’t know the name!) to make it look like the slippers have laces. This gave them a bit more leeway to get over the bears’ feet without leaving them gaping too wide around the ankle once they were on.
Two pairs of perfectly fitted slippers, fit for a king. I have to say that apart from the difficulty adjusting these to fit teddy bears they were amazingly easy to make, and if you fancy making a pair for yourself then I highly recommend them as a quick project. Buy the book, it’s full of quirky and fun things and I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.
