Rockin' robots!

After warming Lolo's toesies with his puppy bootees, the time had come for a little Julian warming so I got right to work last week concocting the 'perfect' slippers for this eccentric 3 year old of mine. 

And here they are.  The quintessential rocking robot slipper boots for the boot wearing, rock and roll obsessed, robot loving, red favouring Jubilee Bubilee of mine ;0)  And how I loved making these for him, the whole time anticipating how much he would love everything about them.  This is one project that brings together all his (current) favourite things and for all of those things they mean to him (and to me) they just might be my favourite thing I ever made for him.

You see, my little guy is totally obsessed with his bright orange winter boots (a steal from Land's End overstocks which I got in the middle of summer).  Completely and utterly obsessed.  So obsessed that despite the high temperatures of July and August, my little guy would sneak on those squall boots anytime I wasn't looking.  

When I  insisted he took them off, he would carefully placed them in his little blue cart and take them for walks around the neighbourhood, to the park, out with friends and of course to bed. So when I started thinking about the perfect indoor slippers for him, I knew they would have to be boots!   

They also had to be red, his new new favourite colour (it sure beats his previous favourite colours, brown and black!), but since all I scavenged from the stash by way of feltable wool was but 8 yards of red yarn I decided to go in a different direction and add some embroidery of his two other favouritest things: robots and guitars (a nod to his favourite thing to do with his dada: watch him play guitar hero with the tv robot character, the red guitar, on the truck stage preferably playing "I want to rock and roll all night" or "Slow Ride")!

I used Knitting at Knoon Design's Family of slippers pattern and modified it by working 1 row stripes in gray and cream Lopi (I used about 2/3 of each ball), working the cuff for 30 rows , adding an i-cord for stability, knitting an afterthought heel and adding some embriodery.  Oh and I painted on some morse code with puff paint on the soles to make them less slippery.

When he first saw his new slipper boots, the first words out of his mouth were:  "They're perfect!"

Indeed ;0)

Woof!

The leaves are raked, the tires are changed, the pool is winterized, the snow removal pickets have been picketted at the end of our driveway, and my little Lolo bean has some brand new puppy slippers.  Winter?  Bring it on mother nature...if you dare!

My little Lolo's been sniffly for a few days and it occured to me that his socks needed some knitterly reinforcement ;0)  So naturally, I raided the stash and found a ball and a quarter of Lett Lopi in a dark brown heather with which to knit and felt him some slippers!

The pattern is from a book called Baby Knits Heads & Toes which is filled with cute hats and booties but alas they're all too small for my 18 month old, 5.5 inch footed little dude so there were a bunch of mods which I pretty much faked thinking felting would hide a multitude of sins which it did!  Basically, I took the figures for the largest size and multiplied by 1.2 where it made sense and ignored the "you should now have" numbers since mine were seriously wonky.

I added little i-cord stump eyes and noses pre-felting (above) and improvised a little eye patch and off to the washer they went.  3 cycles later, they were just the right size!  I knit up the cuffs with stash Knit Picks shine in a light gray and am really impressed that these stay on.  Though until I get some puff-paint on the soles, these are sooooo not safe to wear.  He's like bambi on ice wearing these around our house.  Cute, but deadly! 

Ah winter!  How my knitterly heart loves thee ;0)  Now for some rocking felted boots for my Jubilee Bubilee...