Booting the booties

A friend of mine recently announced that she's expecting her first child in June. I'll be meeting her for lunch later this week, so last week I thought it might be nice to whip up a pair of baby booties as a congratulations-for-being-pregnant gift. Baby booties have always struck me as extremely impractical and fairly useless, but, gosh, they can be pretty cute. And I've never knit any before, so I figured this was a good time to make my first pair. I used the pattern in Baby Knits for Beginners by Debbie Bliss, though not the yarn (her own, of course) she calls for; instead I substituted a similar weight merino (in a nice coppery-brown color) that I had on hand.

I cast on this sucker four times. That's not a huge deal, because these things are so tiny, but it was annoying. The entire pattern is in seed stitch, and I had some trouble with the "increase one stitch on each end of ever other row" part--my seed stitch kept getting messed up, no matter how careful I was. Each shoe is knit in one piece, so I persevered through the first section, the sole. But when I started shaping the toe and heel, it was pretty obvious that my bootie was not looking like Debbie's bootie (her book has a photo of a completely knit but not yet sewn up bootie). I read her instructions six times, rechecked my work, and looked for errata (none for this pattern). Either I am completely unable to understand her pattern, or the writeup is incorrect and she hasn't fixed it yet.

"That's it," I said. "I'm frogging this." What a relief to put this project behind me. As for my mommy-to-be friend...well, I think I'll just give her a book.