Rainbow Striped Baby Booties

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A colleague of mine just had a baby, so I made these adorable rainbow baby booties for her.  I’ve made two pairs of these before and it just occurred to me that they were also for colleagues… I guess every baby at BUILD need a pair of these, huh?

These adorabe half-brioche booties are from Regina Willer’s Blue Steps Baby Booties pattern and the yarn is Knit Pick’s Felici in Rainbow.

The time I mad these, everyone insisted they were way too tiny to fit a baby’s foot, so I tried to make this pair larger.  First, I made one with size 3 needles instead of 1.5 and they were bigger length-wise, but the row gauge was too big and the shaping was off.  My pal Will told me they looked like they were made to fit an elephant embryo… hahha.  So, I started over with size 1.5 needles but I increased on the sole until I had 64 stitches instead of 58 – hopefully that will be enough to make some extra toe-room for baby!

Two Tips:

For the sole, if you use a color from one of the felici stripes, you likely need a little more yarn than just one stripe allows so you have to jump ahead to the next stripe sequence and borrow some extra.  (I happened to have some leftover yellow Stroll so I just used that to knit the soles on their pair.)

My final important tip for these booties is that you need to control the color change on the garter-stitch section at the front of the bootie so when the new color comes up it’s always on a knit row, not a purl row.  This meant that I had to snip my yarn on the blue section and snip some blue out of the next stripe sequence to get a little extra yardage.  Not ideal, but it bugged me too much not to have a clean color change.

Here is an example of what I mean, from a previous pair I knitted – see the dashes where the color changes in the bootie on the right? You want to avoid that.

The little bow on the front is made from a two-stitch i-cord, 7” long.  I finished off with Jeny’s Surprisingly Stretchy Bind Off instead of the sewn bind off.

yarn details

Knit Picks Felici in Rainbow
Fingering Weight
75% Superwash Merino Wool, 25% Nylon
Machine wash/Tumble dry low
$5.99 per 50 g /218 yd ball

Knit Picks Stroll in Dandelion
Fingering Weight
75% Superwash Merino, 25% Nylon
Machine Wash Cold, Lay Flat to Dry
$5.49 per 50 g / 231 yd skein

project details

pattern: “Blue Steps – Baby Booties” by Regina Willer (free on her blog); used the rewritten version by hellahelan  (on her project page on Ravelry)
needles: US size 1.5 (2.5 mm) nickel-plated circs – magic loop
yarn used: 19 grams (like 85-ish yards?)
finished size:  Sole is 3.5” long totally in a totally rested state — it stretches easily to ~4.25, which is what I was aiming for. Height: 2 inches.
duration: March 6 – 13, 2021