With the change in season and the holidays approaching quickly, I have decided to knit up some baby socks. There are plenty of wee recipients in my life right now, but I realized that I didn’t have any idea what size the socks should be – my kids are way beyond baby years and I found that my size references have so completely changed that I am at a total loss when faced with the question, “how long is the foot of a six month-old baby?”
(photo yanked from the Web via Google image search)
There weren’t any spare babies laying around the house, so I pulled up a couple of free patterns over on Ravelry, grabbed some yarn, and just dove right in to see what happened. This is what I ended up with, using 32 stitch cast on and size 2 needles with leftover Duet sock yarn from A Swell Yarn Shop:
(photo taken while my daughter got a haircut; sorry about the poor image quality)
Cute, right?
Thing is, I don’t know what baby to give these to. I have nieces and nephews of varying ages. Coworkers with babies. Friends with babies. Babies ranging in age from brand new to whatever age they stop being considered a baby.
I got a few helpful responses to my plea on Facebook, and then recalled something from the dark, dank part of my brain that remembers stuff that seemed useless at the time but got tagged as “possibly helpful later” —- someone has already done the work for me. Bev’s Country Cottage has handy-dandy size charts for just about anything you might want to make. I didn’t have my ruler with me when I took the picture, and if you look closely you can see that the toes were still on the needle waiting to be grafted together, but now I can measure the wee foot cozy and figure out which babe this pair should go to!
My favorite part of this whole experience is how amazingly fast baby socks are to knit. Two evenings and done – I got more than halfway on the pair while watching some Netflix TV episodes, and then finished them up at the hair place while waiting for my daughter.