I think I accidently invented a new fashion last week. I call it disability chic and it's perfect for anyone who wishes they looked more disabled.
I wasn't trying to start a trend, I was just trying to recycle an old jumper (sweater). I'd had the jumper since my teens, and it was looking pretty tattered. There were holes in both elbows and it was too short in just about every dimension.
My first idea was to unravel the yarn and reknit the jumper into a vest, but when I started pulling on the wool, the 15 year old fibre just broke in my hands. After two hours of toil I still hadn't managed to reclaim a piece as long as my arm, so I checked the tag and found the jumper was 100% wool. With this information I hatched a new plan.
My cunning plan was to felt the entire jumper and then cut up the resulting fabric to make slippers. The felting went well, I threw the jumper into a hot washing machine and had a toddler-sized version in no time. Then I measured my feet and made a pattern out of leftover cotton fabric. I cut the pieces from the felted jumper, blanket stitched them together and tried them on. Easy!
Well, almost easy. Regular readers will know that I have a tendency to overestimate my size. I think this is a result of a childhood spent head and shoulders above my classmates and a lifetime of trying to find ladies clothes in giant sizes. Whatever the reason, the first slipper I stitched up was a little roomy. It wasn't so big that a warm pair of socks didn't make it fit, but I tried to tweak the second one slightly to make it a little snugger without being too different from the first one. This designing on the run made the second slipper look a little lopsided, but they were a trial pair so I didn't worry too much about it.
I proudly donned my new footwear and looked down. I got a terrible shock, my right foot had turned in under itself, exactly as it had before my last round of rehab. Horrified that two years of physio and corrective footwear had seemingly undone themselves I whipped off the slipper to have a closer look.
My foot looked fine. I put the slipper back on, and there it was again, my foot was definately rolling inwards. The slippers were roomy, so I felt around and found my ankles and feet seemed to be facing the right way, but the lopsided second slipper rolled slightly on my foot, so the inner seam was underneath my foot instead of along the edge of the sole. The seam was soft, so it didn't affect my walking, in fact they were really comfortable, they just accentuated my disability.
So I now have a pair of slippers that imitate my "natural" gait. I get all the style points and flair of an obvious disability, without the associated hip, knee and spine pain associated with walking with my foot on sideways. I'm hoping that disability chic takes off and there'll be a new market for clothes that accentuate our differences instead of covering them up. Help me get the fashion started and let me know what you'd wear to make yourself look more like your inner-crip.
