I saw these booties and decided that I had to make some strawberry booties. After looking at all the strawberry alternatives on Ravelry, I came back to this pattern, which just looks the cutest to me. As luck would have it, shortly thereafter one of my colleagues and his wife announced that they were expecting a baby, so I dived in.

I have never done stranded color work before, and I wasn’t sure it made sense to do it here, since the contrast color only gets used for nine isolated stitches on each boot. So instead, I knit the entire body of the boot in red and added white seeds afterward with duplicate stitching. (I just like the look of white seeds better than green ones.) Weaving the white on the wrong side in between the seeds was a pain, but I don’t think it was worse than carrying the white through the entire instep, plus I am certain that there are no loops for the baby to catch her toes in.

When I bought the pattern, the instructions for the first few rows of the lace cuff left out the last half of the fourth leaf, but it was easy enough to fill in the missing stitches. The pattern has since been fixed. I thought it would be fun to emphasize the frilliness of the edge, so on the final lace row I replaced the p3tog’s with p3’s to make the edge flare outward. I’m sure the lace would have looked better if I had blocked it, but I was racing to get done before the baby shower.

Inspired by some of the other strawberry booty patterns, I decided to make I-cord ties instead of using ribbon. To keep them small enough to thread and tie easily, I used a size 0 needle.