Bootie-licious: Craftster Addiction Leads to Sewing Binge

Warning: craftster.org may lead to inspiration and spontaneous arts and crafts.

I've been reading Craftster lately, and it's leading to strange behavior: spontaneous sewing.

My grandmothers were both fabulous seamstresses, but my mom only learned basic sewing and pretty much loathed it. In 2004-05, I lucked into a year of sewing instruction from an amazing group of octogenarians who have been a sewing club since 1957(!). They're fascinating people and great teachers. I'm now a functional seamstress. It took me a few months to make a curtain (one curtain).

Anyway, it's soon to be raining babies here- so I started thinking about useful gifts that we didn't receive before Ranger was born.

One of our favorite things was given to us by the hospital. They had these little flannel mitts to keep him from scratching himself. He had a blue pair at first, but after a barf incident those were replaced with a red pair. Ranger was mesmerized by the red mitts as they floated past his face. Seriously, they were his first toy and they kept him captivated.


So I made some baby mitts from some red bumblebee satin with a flannel backing for a couple friends. They needed something more, so I found a cute bootie pattern in a library copy of Handmade Baby Gifts (Teresa Layman).

Two pairs of booties later, I started thinking about a friend expecting a boy in the Fall. I didn't think the made-up bees would be very appropriate for the son of a military man, so I found some discarded BDU sleeves from my brother's military service and whipped up a third pair of booties.


6 booties and 4 mitts in less than a week. I'm pretty pleased with myself.

So, what fabric- based baby items did you find indispensable? And where can I find a pattern?

P.S. The intended recipients of these gifts are not to my knowledge readers of this blog, so if you happen to know them too, please don't tell them about this post. Thanks.