Squishiliousness Part 2

I know I told you you’d see the whole set of dress, booties, and bonnet when this is done. However, I finished the booties today, and couldn’t help but sharing them.

I stuffed them with fleece scraps, so pardon the lumpiness. I just think seeing them stuffed is a little bit better than seeing them flat. They weren’t made to be flat, you know. They were made to fit around chubby little round feet.

These Mary-Jane booties designed by Bekah Knits were made with lilac colored pima cotton dk weight yarn for the main portion, and ivory fingering weight 75% bamboo/25% nylon yarn for the “fake” sock that is attached. While I must say that both of these yarns are incredibly soft and silky and have great stitch definition, they are also very slippery and tend to split a lot, and show every single split! So I wouldn’t recommend this type of yarn for a beginner. Definitely at least an intermediate knitter.

I have some extra bits of yarn in these weights in acrylic and wool blends in really fun colors like ruby red or black in my yarn stash, so I may decide (if I have extra time before the baby come *insert hysterical laughter here*) to make a few extra of these booties just for fun, and not for matching outfits like this set is for. I think yarns with those contents might “grip” better when knitting and it might go a bit faster.

However, the reviews from this pattern say they are great “stay on” booties, and I can’t wait to try them out. They seem a bit big to me, but they’re made in size 0-6 months, so I suppose that seems right, as I just finished a bitty newborn outfit. The dress they go with are 3-6 months, so logically they should fit at the same time.

The pattern itself was not too tough, but was a bit tedious for my taste. I only pick tedious patterns when the cuteness overcomes me, and that was the case here. However, there were 3 seams, 13 yarn ends to weave in, and 1 button to sew on per shoe, so not exactly the instant gratification that you get when you “finish” knitting like my last post.

Like I said, though, the cuteness overwhelms that pattern fault, so I will definitely be using this pattern again.

Last night I cleaned my entire sewing room, and organized it. Now that I have that fresh clean start, I plan on working through my “Gretchen’s too lazy to finish any project” pile and turn it into a “finished and finally out of my sewing space” pile. Some of the projects in this enormous pile will take 5 minutes to finish. Others a few hours, but I’m hoping to at least finish one project a day. About half of them are for my family, and the other half are store things that I started but had to interrupt because of a custom order that demanded my attention sooner. Then after the custom is done, I have forgotten about it, and start a new one. Then the cycle continues. Then of course, there was the unfinished projects that I started when I was on the sewing/quilting retreat last spring (how many months ago now) that couldn’t be finished due to me forgetting some essential piece at home.

So I’m working towards my goal of getting completely rid of this pile by New Years. I’ll keep you updated.