March 29, 2011 A commission for melodydrama whose co-worker is due in the next week or so. She gave me the yarn, which is nice and soft, but it’s really tufty, which makes me worry about its suitability for a baby. We picked out the pattern together, but she didn’t want the ribbon on it, so I substituted a straight knit round where the eyelet row was. Now I’m wishing I had continued the ribbing down further.

I’m learning a lot from this project. The new techniques include working in the round using the Magic Loop; knitting through both the front and back loops of a knit stitch; and picking up stitches. The next and final step on this booty is to successfull graft the bottom together with the Kitchner stitch. Key word being successfully.

I haven’t found it all that enjoyable so far, but that may be because I’m still getting used to the Magic Loop thing. I also wove in some scrap yarn at the end of each of the short-rows to make it easier to go back and pick up stitches. I certainly made picking up the stitches easier, but I had to go back and re-work the short rows a couple times before I was able to refine my technique. Hopefully the next bootie of the pair will come a bit easier.

April 4, 2011 So I had a little “cheat sheet” that bananaknits had given me on how to do the kitchner stitch that I used to graft the bottom of these booties. It looked like it was coming out oddly, but I couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong. I showed melodydrama, who said it looked fine. But, sure enough, half-way through grafting the bottom of the second baby bootie of the pair, I figured out what I was doing wrong! Fixed it on both booties, and now it looks SO much better.

The second bootie did go a lot faster, now that I have the hang of the magic loop thing, but I don’t enjoy the technique itself all that much. If I do much more of this whole knitting-in-the-round business, it may be worth it to invest in some DPN’s.

The finished product is very cute and very soft.

♥