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OK, so I know I said I wasn't going to work on the UFOs during my "vacation".

Well, that was before I got strep throat on the very first day of my "vacation".  I mean, it's not like I had this penciled in on my calendar:

• Friday morning:  Drop off DH at airport.  Teach Friday group class.
• Friday afternoon:  Get sick.
• Saturday:  Continue being sick.  Work on the bunny ears for UFO #2.  Look up symptoms of strep throat. Become concerned.
• Sunday:  Get a little sicker.  Decide that spending 2 hours feeling lousy at home isn't any better than spending 2 hours feeling lousy in the urgent care waiting room.
• Sunday afternoon:  Obtain positive strep culture and antibiotics.

So, as long as I wasn't doing anything really exciting over the weekend, I did disposition UFO #3, which was the glam rock vest:  a top-down vest in a funky furry & eyelash yarn of somewhat questionable taste.  Yes, the eyelash in that yarn is a shiny, pretty yellow-gold.  And somewhere underneath all that eyelash, the furry yarn is pink and white.  This was meant to be the back of the vest, from the shoulders to the underarms.

The glam rock vest was so-called because I fondly imagined it as something Elton John might wear.  However, a while ago, someone had remarked that it looked more like a Muppet — or maybe they were suggesting that I would look like a Muppet wearing it – I wasn't listening too closely.

Well, there definitely are some cool Muppets:  for instance, Janice, the lead guitar player in the Electric Mayhem, whose style I have always admired — particularly those fab eyelashes.  (And finding out that she was originally conceived as a male Muppet, as a takeoff on Mick Jagger, has only increased her cool factor in my eyes.)

However, whether you're talking Elton John, Janice the Muppet, or Mick Jagger – I've concluded that I just don't think I have that kind of stage presence.  (Nor that kind of sexual ambiguity.)

And, since it is unlikely I'll be joining a rock band any time soon, I really won't have anywhere to wear the thing, anyway.

Sadly, though, I still kind of like the look of the fabric.  There's something about it that appeals to my 9-year-old's dramatic fashion sense.

OK, OK, I admit it:  it's all that fluffy, dancing eyelash.  You can never have too much eyelash, IMHO.  And that yellow-gold would really look GREAT on Janice – it would go so nicely with her hair.

But, the feel of the fabric was really kind of – well, gross.  While it was undeniably glam, and furry, it was also rather plasticky.  It actually had a kind of icky "scroop" to it – definitely not a nice one like silk has.

Silk has a special characteristic called "scroop" — this is often referred to as a crunchy feel, and it also has a rustly sound.

So, the vest was frogged in about an hour, and that takes care of UFO #3.

Which — in case you're keeping score at home – puts me about 3 days to the good.

AHA!  but what about UFO #2, you ask?

Ahhh, the bunny slippers.  Well, yes.  I've been deliberately keeping you in suspense on that one.

When we left off, I had two ears knitted, and two to go, and then we would be off to the felting races — or felting crapshoot, as the case may be was.

I got all four ears knitted, although not in the extremely optimistic timeframe I had predicted in the last post.  Over Strep Throat Saturday, I finished embellishing them with the fur yarn, and finally felted them.  Don't they look great??  They even have a bit of curvature to them, just as bunny ears should.  (And if I had tried to achieve that on purpose, I'm sure it wouldn't have worked out.)

I've attempted to keep the lint trap of the dryer about the same size in these two pics, so you can see they shrunk quite a bit.

Unfortunately, not quite enough.

You can see that they are still rather too big to fit comfortably on the top of the slippers.  And believe me, I tried.  I felted those things three times.

Just before I gave 'em up for dog toys, I got out one of the original slippers for a comparison shot, because I felt (get it?) that the previous picture really didn't show just how oversized the ears were for the slippers.  Notice how on the original, the white part is the actual size of the ear, and the rest is just pink fur sticking out around the sides…

… heyyyyy… wait a minute…  if I trim those pink edges off my ears, they might be small enough!!  and they will actually even be more true to the original!!

So I got out the scissors — what did I have to lose?  I'd just have some slightly smaller dog toys, if it didn't work out.

Here the ears on the left have been trimmed, and the ears on the right are as felted.  I think this photo makes it plain that the ears, as-felted, really were just too darned big.

And here, both sets of ears have been trimmed, and we're back in business!  Hooray!  Now for some pom-poms and pink eyes!!  As long as I get these done by the 30th, I'll still be on my medal-winning pace.