Let's start the week with a quick project!
As you all know I like to knit little baby booties. Not only are these quick projects (you can knit up a pair in a few evenings) they make wonderful gifts as well. It is impressing how many different patterns exist to make baby booties! The most special patterns are from the 30's and the 60's. Vintage patterns tend to have rather bad quality pictures or no pictures at all so sometimes you can only guess how the finished item is supposed to look like. This makes knitting fun!
Knitted baby booties were very popular in the past, but I'm convinced there can be fashionable today as well, especially for newborn and young babies up to about 7-8 months. After those months babies tend to pull them off and they are certainly not safe anymore when they start to set their first steps. I'm planning to test and share more patterns, that's why I call this 'the big baby bootie project'. Another pattern with different construction here.
Today I'd like to share a 1940's baby bootie pattern from the AWW. These booties are special because of an interesting toe-construction. The foot is knitted flat, in an unusual way: in the length. The toe part is constructed by sewing together three triangle shaped parts. The top part features a two-colored ribbing. I used pink for my sample, as instructed by the pattern, but I can imagine choosing a darker grey yarn instead of white to make the contrasting color pop.
construction:
The bootie before sewing:
The ribbing, right side and wrong side:
Sewing up the toe:
material and sizing:
- The yarn specified in the instructions is a 2-ply fingering weight yarn, with no.10 needles (metric 3,25) and 8 sts per inch.
- I used for my sample a fingering weight yarn with metric size 3 needles. My gauge was about 7 sts per in. My finished size from heel to toe is about 3 in or 7 cm. According to baby boot charts this should fit a 3 months old baby.
There is no good original picture of the finished booties to compare, so mine is the result of following the instructions exactly as they are.
I wasn't totally sure of the top part. It crossed my mind that I possibly knitted the scalloped edge inside out. Still, when you follow the instructions, you should finish the 2-colored ribbed part with the 1st pattern row, which means that you start with the next (1st row) on the wrong side. Both sides look good and by looking at the picture I just couldn't decide which one was the right side. Logically, I did it right, because the foot is knit in garter stitch and the top edge features garter stitch as well.
the pattern:
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