Are you in search of a sweet handmade gift for upcoming babies in your life? Recently I found myself with several coworkers and friends who all announced that they were expecting babies this spring. While I love the chance to make gifts for important people in my life, baby blankets for all of them at once was an impossible task. Even though I have greatly improved my baby sweater skills, which you can read about here, I needed an alternative answer. Enter the baby booties!
Booties for the Cuties!
Baby booties are adorable. There is no arguing with that, it is a fact. Walking through department stores I always coo at the impossibly small baby booties on display. Since they are so small, baby booties are a great item to make when you want to experiment with different stitches or if you are pressed for time.
A quick search for baby bootie patterns yields hundreds of results. It doesn’t matter if you knit or crochet, there are great options out there. For my first bootie, I wanted something with a simple design so I could gauge how it would come together. I decided to crochet the Parker Baby Booties by Sewrella. An exact gauge isn’t given in the pattern. Instead, the pattern references using different sized crochet hooks to obtain larger or smaller booties. My first pair of booties used Simply Soft yarn and a size G6 4.0 mm crochet hook.
According to the pattern notes this should result in a bootie that would be appropriate for ages 4 – 6 months. The pattern calls for worsted weight yarn, and Simply Soft seems to be on the thinner side of the worsted weight scale. I realized that I have no idea how big the feet on a 4 – 6 month old is on average. I didn’t know how to judge if I needed change the hook size.
Measuring Tape to the Rescue
While out for errands I decided that the best way to figure out how big the booties should be was to measure existing booties. I found a nice variety of tiny little booties at Kohl’s. Out came the measuring tape from my purse (I know you have one too). In a few minutes I had written down approximate lengths and widths for everything from newborn to 24 months. In comparing different brands and styles I noticed there was a range of measurements for each size. Next, I typed up my scribbled notes and added them to the table below for ease of visualization.
Will Crocheted Baby Booties Measure Up?
The obvious next step was to compare all of my notes to the little bootie fresh off my crochet hook. The tape measure came back with a verdict: as often happens my tension was a little tight and the finished product a little small. The pattern had indicated the final bootie would fit a 4 – 6 month old, yet it measured right at 3.5 inches in length, the measurement I most commonly saw at the newborn size. I wanted a baby booties that would fit for several months. I changed up my hook to H8 5.0 mm and went with a thicker worsted weight yarn. A much better (and slightly bigger) result!
I enjoyed stitching up these quick gifts for coworkers and friends. Baby booties are a great project to try out new stitches or techniques because they are small and work up quickly. If you’re in the mood for some more baby gift ideas, check out my other ideas in a previous blog post.
