Well, this may be the shortest knitalong on record. I have completed my Fuzzy Feet, without having much interaction with my fellow footalongers or even seeing their pictures. I may have to make another pair.
Here is the unfelted first Fuzzy Foot, sitting on my nightstand so that there are objects to compare its size to. It was only after I uploaded that I considered that this picture contains both an enormous cup and a tiny pen.
Ah, well.
And here are the felted Fuzzy Feet, in the same milieu.
A couple of notes on felting KnitPicks Wool of the Andes: it felts very fast compared with other yarns I have used — I barely caught these before they became teeny tiny elf shoes. And they are very smelly when wet. Rather like having the actual sheep in the room with you.
If I do make another pair, I think I will make the cuff longer.
I completed the Fuzzy Feet last night while simultaneously being beaten at chess and watching The Screaming Skull, a horror movie which offered free burial to any patrons who died of fright while watching it. I don’t like actual scary movies, but ancient ones like this are fun. This film contains a woman who roams around in a diaphanous nightgown, investigating scary noises. While I have often seen and read parodies of this scenario, I had never previously seen it presented seriously. You have to wonder why she didn’t just lock the door and stay in her room.
She also spent a good bit of camera time in her underwear. I understand that in those days they had to work the gratuitous nudity in anywhere they could. They figured that, had they gone directly from underwear to diaphonous nightgown, they would have only a few seconds of flesh. So they had to come up with a device to keep her in her undies a little longer. Here it is: she was reading a novel by Henry James and had it on her bedside table. So, having removed her clothing, she picks up the novel and nuzzles it a bit. I don’t think she actually read it or anything.
Can you imagine the planning meeting on that?
“How can we keep her in her undies a little longer?”
“Well, she could read that book. Or at least pick it up.”
“In her bra and slip? While getting ready to go to bed, only to be pursued by a screaming skull?”
“Hey, it’s Henry James!”
“Well, that’s true. Okay.”
The reason we were watching that movie last night instead of tonight — we usually watch cheesy horror movies for Hallowe’en — is that I have a rehearsal tonight.
At 6:30, I should be singing “Dona Nobis Pacem” at the university, having brought the cookies.
From 4:00 until 7:00, I will be reading spooky stories to little children in this vaguely Renaissance get-up. I don’t think you can actually see this costume at all in my picture. White muslin, ribbons, black velvet, dark blue tartan taffeta, McCall’s pattern… Doesn’t matter. The essential point will have struck you: namely, the two scheduled events overlap significantly. I can’t even dash directly over at 7:00, because I will be in costume. I have to go from the East side of town home to change clothes, and then over to the college on the West side of town. With cookies.
No solution to this quandary has yet occurred to me, though I am kind of thinking about taking the cookies over this morning before work.
HI! Great fuzzy feet. it’s cool to see what it looks like before as well as after felting. good job!
Might be too late to suggest this, but why can’t you go to rehearsal in costume? It *is* Halloween after all. Lots of folks dress up for their jobs so why not for the choir, too? Alternatively, bring your change of clothes and change where you are reading or change at the rehearsal place. Either way, that should save driving back home.
That is some very neat feet…
i like the fuzzy feet =)
‘picking the note off the floor’ is exactly what our teacher expected us to do. Just before you started sounding the note you bent down and pretended that you were picking something off the floor. Thinking about it this morning I think I have worked out why it worked. We were all inexperienced singers and lacked confidence while singing. As a result we never projected our voices at full power. I can project relatively easily if I stay about mid range (around concert A) of my natural range and notes are clearer and truer at full projection for anyone who is not tone deaf than at partial projection. If I go much above that however my confidence is less so I don’t open my throat or project my voice much and I don’t make the notes. The mechanics of bending down and then recovering aids voice projection because it forces breath control. As you bend down you generally breath out and empty your lungs (bending contracts the lungs) when you straighten up your lungs expand and you take in a deep breath. Once you are fully upright (with your high note in your hand 🙂 you have a lung full of breath that needs to be expelled – so you expel the note at full projection. I’m not sure how useful it would be to those with full singing confidence and able to use their full natural range anyway (it probably didn’t help my sister, she knew and used her full vocal range whenever she sang) but it helped most of us because we wouldn’t use our singing voices at full volume under normal circumstances. (And it looked really funny and eccentric – although we didn’t do that during a performance of course)
And I’m not sure whether an adventurous life has that much to recommend it. Friends and the occasional relative of mine have had ‘adventurous’ sections in their lives in the past, and now they do their best to forget them. I feel deprived, I don’t have anything that exciting in my past that I’d prefer to forget. (As a teen I used to envy my more adventurous friends even while I was lecturing them on what I considered to be their foolishness.)