Roller skate baby booties

Hello! I'm a big believer in the idea that mini things are just somehow cuter than regular sized things. I don't know why, but they just are. These baby booties that I made prove this rule; they are SO TINY and SO ADORABLE. I can barely even stand it.

I made these for my friend Toni, who is also my Skate Fit instructor. Skate Fit is pretty awesome; it's kind of like a circuit class mixed with a skills lesson and is super helpful if you want to improve your skating and fitness and bit quicker than just going to social skates (which I also love, by the way!). This week was our last Skate Fit class for a while though because, as you may have guessed, Toni is having a baby! Toni is an artistic skater by trade, so she wears those sweet high topped white skate boots that derby freshies like me lust after. When I found this pattern I knew it would be perfect, since the booties look really similar to Toni's skates!

 

I used a pattern by Andrea Collins to make these and they turned out perfectly; I'm very pleased with them and would definitely recommend the pattern. The only thing that I would have liked was a guideline for size customisation. As I mentioned, these are tiny; probably really only good for newborns (I'm not positive as I don't know many babies, but they are only about 7cm long so pretty small!) and I would have liked to have the option to make them a little bigger (cough *to fit me* cough).

The pattern recommends black yarn for the trucks/ sole but I went with grey because Toni's trucks are silver. It also suggests hot pink for the trim and laces, but I had this gorgeous mint green yarn which I desperately wanted to use for something; plus, it's pastel, so perfect for babies, right? I kept the boots white, but I did the wheels in the same mint green instead of grey because I thought it would be cuter. Toni's wheels are actually transparent with glitter, but I didn't think I'd be able to recreate that, unfortunately!

The wheels are sewn onto the sole which meant, for me at least, that in the inside of the boot some of the stitching was visible. To fix this, I crocheted a little insole for each skate, just by doing the first three rounds of the sole pattern. I also added a little non-toxic glue to the tops of the stitches inside the boot to hopefully prevent them from fraying or coming loose. Loose wheels are never a good thing!

 

The pom-poms on the ends of the laces are possibly one of my favourite things about this pattern. They're so tiny and cute! The smallest size of my pom-pom maker was way too big for this project, so I made these tiny pom-poms using a fork! 

I used 100% acrylic in DK weight for all of yarns in this project, and a 4mm hook. Baby wool would probably be a good option for it too, but I didn't want to use any of my wool yarn as I thought it could be too itchy. I personally can't stand the feel of wool on my skin, so I avoid it unless it's super super soft.

 

The wheels were the worst part of this project. Basically you have to crochet tiny spheres, which really hurt my poor fingers! If I was doing this again, I might resort to needle-felting them! They do look good though, so I'm pleased I stuck with it.

I gave these to Toni today at our (last *crying*) Skate Fit session and she really liked them! I hope that her little one will get some use out of them ... until they're ready for proper skates anyway! ~___^

I'm mostly definitely sold on baby booties as a gift now though, as I did these in only a couple of hours over two days; gotta love a nice quick project!

- Lisa xx