FO Friday: Happy Feet

I have finished the first pair of slippers:

Are they adorable or what. Not that I take credit for the adorableness. The folks at Knitting Pure and Simple get credit for that.

The design is ingenious and the directions are crystal clear.  It's a fairly simple pattern. The overcast stitch used to sew up the bottom and back of the heel is very easy, even for a terrible seamstress like me. My only complaint is about the yarn; and you can read about that here if you missed it.

As I hinted above, there will be more Mukluk Slippers. I just think they will be great gifts.

Summer: Already?

We literally had three days of spring here in Wisconsin, and now it's summer. At least, it's a pleasant summer day -- 87 degrees, but not too humid. It was a perfect day for a long walk with a friend and then a bike ride on my own. Some friends invited me to go on a long bike ride, but I haven't built up my fitness level after last year's broken leg. I've got to get out on the bike more and build up some strength!

Slippers are not a very summery knit, but I feel good about working on holiday knits. Pretty soon I'm going to have to figure out how to seam these up:

Madison is a beautiful place in the summer. I snapped this photo of our state Capitol this morning. I biked downtown and actually did some work while sipping an iced coffee at a cafe that had an outdoor area. If only summer could always be this pleasant!

WIP Wednesday: Mukluk

Although this may look like an FO...

... it really is a WIP:

It won't be done until I sew up the seam that runs along bottom!

I am really loving this pattern, but this first slipper took me forever to finish because the yarn is hard on my hands. It is Encore Chunky Tweed: 75% acrylic, 25% wool, and 3% rayon. I don't usually have problems with acrylic-wool blends, so I'm thinking that it's the chunky-ness that is hurting my hands. It is giving me the same kind of pain that I get from Sugar'n Cream cotton yarn.

I looked up the yarn on Ravelry, but couldn't find similar complaints! Knitters gave it 4 out of 5 stars, even. So then I looked up Sugar'n Cream, and it also gets 4 out of 5 stars. Which reminds me of my issue with reader ratings on Amazon. In both cases, these are not statistical surveys. Rather, the respondents are self-selected. I've realized that romance books that I think are terrible get high ratings on Amazon because the people who choose to read them like romance novels.

I would like to point out that Lion Homespun (possibly the most hated yarn out there, though not by me) gets 3 out of 5 stars. And Red Heart Super Saver Solids gets 3 stars, too. Now that is a yarn that I cannot stand the feel of. It's the kind of material that could survive a nuclear holocaust. Still, a lot of knitters like it.

Does anyone know of a yarn that got fewer than 3 stars?

Don't forget to check out other WIPs with Tami Amis.