Checkerboard Slipper Tutorial

A while ago a buddy gave me a holey pair of slippers that his grandma had made for him in hopes that I could reproduce them. Flash forward a year, during which time I still hadn’t gotten around to making them, when one of the Knit knack girls started talking about these checkerboard slippers they wanted to make. I didn’t really pay attention to it until I saw the picture - it was the exact pattern that he had asked me to make! Naturally, when something like that falls into your lap, you know you can’t put it off any more, so I quickly made them up for him.

(those are his hairy legs, not mine)

Recently I was messaged by a couple of knitters for advice on making these rad slippers, so I thought that I’d go ahead and make a photo tutorial of the major features of the pattern. The original pattern is written well enough, but simply lacks pictures of any kind.

The first thing that you need to understand about this pattern is that its structure is based on the biggest NO-NO of colorwork: carrying your unused color tightly. 99.9% of the time when you are working with multiple colors you want to carry the yarn loosely on the backside of your work, however with this pattern, you actually need to pull the non-working yarn tight. That’s what makes these neat bumps all over the slippers.

If you do it correctly, the backside will feel more smooth and flat, looking something like this:

You’ll also notice that the edge has a rippled effect. That’s okay! This will become the heel portion which will be stitched together.

The pattern tells you to anchor the contrasting color at beginning of each row, which just means that you need to twist the contrast color around the working color before the first stitch. In the picture below, white is the working color which twists around the green, kinda like this:

This anchoring of the yarn at the edge, along with pulling the stitches tight, will eventually make for a very nice turned edge, which should look like this:

When you’re working on the wrong side you have to switch your yarn colors between the needles to change color, much like when you are switching from knit to purl if you were ribbing. As shown in the picture below green has just been worked so I move that between my needles to the front (wrong side), and move the white between the needles to the back (right side) to begin knitting with the white.

The rest of the pattern should be fairly simple – just garter stitch knitting, simple decreases for the toe and then sewing seams.

Voila!