Weekend update, 1-4 March (Storm Emma!)

Well, we survived the "Beast from the East" and my first-ever snow day more or less without incident. On the first day of the storm, I arranged to work from home, but by around 9:30 the university decided to close up shop, so I got an unexpected 4-day weekend!

The view out our back window on day 2 of Storm Emma.

As someone who grew up in Los Angeles, I still get a little giddy whenever it snows even a little bit, and we had much more than a little snow this weekend. The cold weather didn't stick around in South Wales nearly as long as it did in other parts of the country, but my area did get just under two feet of snow over the course of two days, accompanied by 45mph winds. In spite of the giddiness, I confess I did worry a bit about our garden as the snow drifts rose over the tops of our raised beds and completely buried a large portion of our herb garden. I was very glad that that we'd finished the raised beds and put new cloche hoops and fleece over them.

By Sunday morning, the snow was beginning to thaw and I peeked outside to inspect the damage to our herbs, which weathered the storm without protection. Much to my amazement, the only casualties appeared to be a recently-transplanted garlic mustard and a couple of broad beans whose cover blew off during the worst part of the storm. Plants are amazing.

Rosemary, sage, and thyme emerging from the snow.

In fact, over and above their natural resilience, I learned another amazing thing about plants this weekend. While poking around the garden, I noticed that the snow seemed to be thawing faster around the plants, as you can see around the thyme in the lower right corner of the photo above. I wondered whether this was simply because there was less snow to melt (e.g. because the leaves blocked the flakes, creating air pockets), or because the plants themselves gave off heat. After all, they're living things, and living things tend to produce heat, right? After a bit of googling, I can report that yes! Plants do release very small amounts of heat as part of respiration!

My mind is now all a-buzz, wondering whether there's some way to make use of that heat. Obviously, the amount of heat released must be very small, or I probably would have heard of people taking advantage of it long before now, but it does make me wonder about the thermal benefits of a conservatory or lean-to greenhouse full of plants vs. without plants...

While the storm was blowing a gale outside, I took advantage of the time to work on a few crafty bits and bobs. I mended a pair of Steve's trousers and one of my sweaters, finished making a pair of crochet slippers that was started in 2007, learned a new technique for sewing narrow rolled hems, which I then used to resume work on a pair of Victorian drawers that has been hibernating for at least six years, made crepes one day and aebleskivers the next, and did a whole bunch of yoga. I even spent a few extra hours writing some documentation for work, even though I wasn't strictly expected to. I'm feeling terribly virtuous.

Of course, all of that virtue promptly disappeared with my morning commute on Monday, but it was certainly nice while it lasted.

Since my finished projects are so few and far between, I feel I ought to give them a bit  of a proper write-up, so here are the details of my new crochet slippers:

Slippers wide enough for even my enormous feet!

Pattern: Hexagon Boot Slippers by Priscilla Hewitt (link to Ravelry)
Yarn: Loops & Threads Impeccable Solids

As written, the pattern looks fairly straightforward: make three hexagons for each slipper, join them together, make a sole, stitch to the uppers, easing around corners. Of course, in reality the pattern worked nothing like that. I made a set of hexagons based on the width of my foot (I have extraordinarily wide feet, to the point where I can't actually buy retail shoes). When I joined three of those hexagons together, the resulting upper was much too large for my foot. (In retrospect, this is not entirely surprising, since the front part of my foot is disproportionately large.) So I kept two of the large hexagons and made four smaller ones for the back part of the upper. I joined them, saw that they more or less fit my foot, and then looked at the sole instructions. And gave up on the pattern for several years.

The sole calls for a special stitch, which is no problem, but the sole is basically a rectangle, which you're supposed to somehow match up to an upper with all sorts of odd angles and corners. Add to that the fact that my footprint is more wedge-shaped than rectangular, and the whole thing becomes an exercise in frustration. In order to move on with this project, I basically decided to throw the pattern out the window and use my own judgment to make up a solution.

At some point, I saw a thing on Pinterest that showed how the soles of espadrilles are made from lengths of braided twine. Starting from the middle of the ball of the foot, the braid makes a tight, flattened spiral, and then a little stem comes off one of the ends of the spiral to form the heel part. The braid wraps around the whole thing until it's the size of the foot.

Improvised sole with
modified upper.

The upper part of the slippers was made in three colors, so I worked with all three colors of yarn held together, and crocheted a sole following the same basic method as the espadrille soles, using all single crochet stitches. I made a short chain, turned and worked back, made 3-4 stitches in the last stitch in the row, then crocheted back through the bottom of the starting chain, making a spiral. At each end of the spiral, I would work a few increases to create a rounded shape that would lie flat. After about three rounds, I worked to the end of the spiral, then made another few inches of chain stitches, turned, crocheted back down the chain, and then rejoined the spiral. The result was something vaguely sole-shaped.

To finish, I took yarn in the color of the outermost round on the hexagons, and made a round of sc to join the upper to the sole. I stitched the upper evenly around the sides of the foot, and eased some extra fullness in around the toe.

Once everything was all in one piece, I put the slippers on. To my disappointment, they were still a little loose and the top was quite floppy, so I made two sc rounds around the upper, working 4 sc together at the front to close up the opening a little bit. On the second round, I worked into the same stitches as the previous round so that I was adding thickness but not much height to the edge.

I then braided an extra length of yarn, knotted the ends, and threaded it through the center front opening like a shoelace, which holds the slippers onto my feet much more snugly. Because I had to make the hexagon for the front of the foot at such a large gauge in order to accommodate my monstrous flipper feet, there are holes just large enough for the tip of my big toe to peek through, and the uppers are not especially warm. Smaller sizes may have better luck. The triple-thickness soles are wonderful though, and do a great job of insulating and cushioning my feet against the tile-over-concrete floor in our kitchen.

After a weekend of wearing these around the house, the soles have started to mold to the shape of my foot, and the heel part of the sole now wraps up around the heel of my foot, kind of like my old fencing shoes, or a pair of Viking-age turnshoes. This amuses me greatly.