Based on the (oh so wonderfully helpful) notes of my fellow Ravelers who have made this soaker before me (Thank you! Thank you! Thank you, all you beautiful people!!!) I knew that it was going to be way too big to pair with the newborn dress I had already made, so I did some research. I looked at a number of other soaker patterns with comparable gauge, and determined that if I were to be keeping the same gauge then the stitch count needed to be just over half that of this pattern. Taking into account the slight overlap of the button bands, and erring on the side of caution (because too big can be grown into, but too small is just too small) I reworked the entire pattern to be 60% of the original size. (Stitch counts, row counts and direct measurements are easily adjusted. The handling of increases and decreases is a little more involved, and I may have fudged a little, but I ended up with something that looks like a soaker and is approximately the right size, so yay me!)

Besides reworking the entire pattern to scale down the size I also worked the first and last 5 stitches in seed stitch everywhere except in the ribbing and around the leg shaping to prevent the edges from curling under. (Thank you casmarn for that suggestion!) I’m not 100% happy with the buttons that I used, but I just couldn’t find buttons that both coordinated with my yarn and came in two sizes, so they’re all the same.

I used a standard long tail cast on for the beginning ribbing, but I bound off all other ribbing using Jeny’s Surprisingly Stretchy Bind-Off.