Hi, baby.

I’m looking at the calendar and finding the number of weeks until you’re due to join us out in the world is alarmingly small. So small that your big sister can count that high without skipping any numbers. You do seem to have made yourself quite at home in there, rearranging the furniture however it suits you, staying up late, eating whatever you want. So maybe you’ll be in no hurry to move out and I’ll be carrying you around a whole month longer than I carried Ada. But it’s definitely time to start getting some things ready for you.

I’ll be honest. Some of the things that are going to be for you were supposed to be for your sister. These booties, for instance.

All I had to do to finish them for your use was to weave the ribbons around the ankles. Ada wasn’t born sporting much in the way of heels, so it was nearly impossible to keep footwear of any kind on her unless you could really cinch it tight around her scrawny little legs. And somehow I never took the necessary ten minutes to scare up a couple of lengths of ribbon and solve that problem with these booties before she grew out of them. (And your sister has tiny feet to this day, so it’s not as though I didn’t have a window of months and months.)

The quilt, though? That’s new. Especially for you. If I can muster the courage, ingenuity, and attention to figure out how to attach and use the walking foot for the sewing machine so I can quilt it before you’re born. (Because after that I’ll still need to hand-stitch the binding, and if we compare the size of that task to the job of putting the ribbons on the booties… I think you can see where I’m going with this.)

By the way, I hope you like green and purple and red. I seem to have stumbled into a bit of a color scheme here.

I picked up a handful of sample skeins of Happiest Girl! Dyeworks sock yarn at Knit Purl’s Sock Summit party back in August. Those little skeinlets are like mini-cupcakes — so cute and brightly irresistible. But what can you actually make with them? Since the dyer was at the party and encouraging us all to take as many as we’d like, I grabbed a pair in several colors with this pattern in mind. And it turns out I was exactly right: one sample skein = one Blue Steps Bootie with just enough left over to weave in the ends! I can’t tell from the internet whether Happiest Girl! is still in existence, but this is the colorway “Parrot” and the resulting socklet does, indeed, make me very happy.

I’ll finish the second one on the train to Tacoma this evening. Madrona, here I come!