Onesies and Booties!

March 6th, 2008 by: cheyenne

A few months before Ronin was born, I got bit with the crafty bug. You probably saw the baby quilt I made but it didn’t end there. Using bits of left-over quilt fabric in addition to other pieces from various projects I have made over the years, I made some baby booties, a little hat, and then Joshua and I stenciled a slew of onesies.

I didn’t post them right away because the majority of them were gifts for friends who were expecting babies. And then I continued not to post them because I’m a lamer.

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First off, Baby Booties! Unable to resist such cuteness, I searched out simple patterns online and found some good ones. Of course, the ones I wanted to make I couldn’t find a pattern for so I downloaded a similar pattern and adapted it.

These are made from an old cashmere sweater of Joshua’s that met with foul play (a washing machine incident that totally wasn’t my fault) and got used to make a whole bunch of different things. I had some scraps left still and made this little teeny hat and booties to match (the booties are made from the pattern above, mostly). I was going to make them as gifts but they turned out so wonky that I had to keep them for myself. And then the wonkiness grew on me and I embroidered (if you can call it that) a twee heart on the sole to make it that much more knock-you-down adorable. Ronin wore the hat (the booties were way big) home from the hospital.

Of course, I was still short a bunch of gifts for friends. Onward!

The following are adapted from the pattern linked above:

These are made from scraps of wool, silk, and cotton, with flannel lining on the inside.

Last but not least: the onesies!

“Lefnut” was for our friend Kurt, named after his skateboard in college. “Riot” is a graffiti we saw in Barcelona in 2003.

Both the dummy (pacifier) and the chair are from graffitis we liked in Barcelona. The dummy was one of the most prolific graffiti tags in the city; this guy painted these things everywhere, elaborate ones with multiple colors, plain ones just black and white, and we saw them in other towns: Valencia, Sitges, Tarragona, etc. The chair was a simple stencil that we found in a few places around town; it was one of my favorites for some reason.

This is just a design I made up. I had to go and make it all complicated with three different overlaid stencils (the branches, the flowers, and the flower centers), which of course required multiple paint applications (with dry time between). Whew. Turned out pretty awesome I think though, as modeled by Celine here. I had to go out and buy pink paint for this (alas, no other color would do for the cherry blossoms), which undermined my War on Pink for the most part. I further rebelled in irony by also painting the Dummy above pink.



5 Comments on “Onesies and Booties!”

  1. shanti says:

    Cute! you should start your own etsy shop. People eat this edgy baby stuff up. I am thinking more about baby clothes now than ever before thanks to my job. It’s crazy how much utterly loathsome stuff there is out there for babies. Love the foldover booties!

  2. littlecheapskate says:

    hey these are awesome! agree that you should start selling these :)

  3. vida says:

    do you have a newborn hat pattern? I JUST finished making a hat and it somehow looks more like a crown. I sort of made my own pattern, and it turns out I am no pattern maker.

  4. vida says:

    oh, and one more question… How did you do the flannel lining? I totally have the crafty bug right now, can you tell?

  5. cheyenne says:

    Hey Vida! I didn’t have a hat pattern; I sewed the thing by eye and then resewed two or three times because the first shot turned out far too wonky–too ‘lobey.’ I did use the info on this website as a guideline: http://www.bevscountrycottage.com/size-chart.html . Ronin’s head was 13.5 in circumference (yeeeeOUCH!) at birth. You could try making a mock-up pattern using some scrap fabric and then taking it apart again when you get it right…

    For the flannel, I cut out the bootie pieces using both fabrics–outside & inside–then i sewed the bootie sides down to the outside sole only. The flannel is “sticky” enough to stay put against the outside fabric so sewing the sides down to the bottom was fairly simple (I did it inside-out so the seams would be inside). Then I sewed the flannel inside sole by hand to the bottom of the bootie, covering the seams and sewing it so the flannel seam is tucked under. I hope that makes sense.. When I turned the finished bootie right-side-out, it was sort of stiff-looking. I ended up making the next pairs with the sides sewn to the bottom flannel inside sole, sewn right-side right, then sewing the outer sole on by hand using the same method (tucking the edges under and covering up the seams). This seemed to make the shape look better.

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Cheyenne Weil, Joshua Coxwell