my first attempt to felt

Over Christmas break, I tried out a knitting pattern for slippers. They are felted slippers, and having never felted before, I thought I might as well give it a try while I had a top-loading washing machine. I was a little wary while knitting and when I put them in the wash. They looked like this:
But after putting them in, and letting the wool do its thing, they turned out like this:So all in all, I'm hoping to felt more things in the future. Over interim, I made a second pair, but they didn't turn out quite as well. Now I need to figure out what went wrong the second time. I meant to post this a long time ago and just never put pictures on my computer.