Time: Several hours per bootie.

Cost: $0 — long-leftover yarn, this.

Speaking as someone who has knit her fair share of socks, I found these booties to be a surprisingly amusing change of pace. I don’t know if booties are a terribly useful baby item — I guess I’ll find out sooner or later — but they sure are fun to knit, and a fine way to use up spare scraps of sock yarn.

I initially started, and shortly abandoned, another baby-sock pattern that struck me as unnecessarily complicated. By comparison, I really like how these booties are engineered — you knit a rectangle for the sole, pick up stitches around it and knit upward for the foot, short-row the top of the foot, and then work the cuff.

Also, the ultrasound hasn’t revealed a tripedal baby: I made three of these because I’m told that baby socks always get lost, so why not have a spare in reserve?

And, like I said: they sure are fun to make.

Time: A couple of evenings, largely spent watching Netflix while pinning.

Cost: Let’s see — around $6 for the minky, $10 for the spools of ribbon, $17.50 for the prefolds, and $10 for the fabric.

One of my most acute — if admittedly frivolous — pregnancy woes has been not being able to knit or sew any clothes for myself. I never realized how much I enjoy making stuff that I can wear until now. But making a few baby things that I know I’ll use in the future is an acceptable, if hopefully short-term, substitute.

One hears a lot about so-called minky fabric when investigating baby crafts. (Personally, the name conjures up the immediate association of Peter Sellers’ Inspector Clouseau investigating whether a certain beggar has the proper license for his monkey, but that’s probably just me.)

At any rate, it’s very soft synthetic fabric, so I sewed two small squares of it together into a kind of ribbon or tag blanket. I’m told that they’re pretty popular among the drooly set, to generally drag around and chaw on. Not even Dr. Karp himself could swaddle an infant in it, but it’s a nice, smallish size (since I only ordered a 1/2 yard of fabric, being cheap) for dragging about and general abuse.

I followed this tutorial pretty closely during the creation. (I particularly recommend taking the marginal extra time required to machine-baste the ribbons onto one side of the fabric before sewing the right sides together, because you’ll spend enough time pinning as it is. It’s not a hard fabric to sew, though.) You’ll want to be particularly careful while sewing around the corners, just to make sure that you don’t accidentally intertwine the ribbons together in some unintentional fashion.

The so-called scrappy towel is an institution in the Jejune household. Most of our stash of scrappy towels consists of my parents’ long-demoted bath towels which are shredding at the edges and decorated with generous splotches of paint. I’m not sure when we stole so much of my parents’ scrappy towel stash — maybe they were used as moving blankets during our move out to grad school in Madison? — but we use them all the time. Need to clean the kitchen counters? Scrappy towel. Accidentally overturn the cats’ water bowl? Scrappy towel. Need to scrub cat vomit out of the carpet? Scrappy towel. Comically ill-managed plumbing mishap on Christmas Day? All of the scrappy towels.

We’re received a number of burp cloths from family and friends — thanks, guys! — but, given how the scrappy towel really is a way of life around here, I wanted to make sure that we have some kind of thicker, larger, baby-type equivalent of the scrappy towel to clean up more substantial messes of all kinds. So, I took the advice of some parent friends and purchased some cotton prefold diapers to use for burp cloths, and unnecessarily decorated them with the ribbons from the above blanket and the fabrics left over from my bunting project.

You can find tutorials for similar burp cloths here, here, and here.

They are also way too cute to devote to infant spit-up, but I a) had the cotton print fabric anyway; b) figure that they’ll make me happy, which should be worth something while sleep-deprived and at odd hours of the night; and c) reckon that they’ll probably have a long and happy afterlife performing household cleanup.

Time: A couple of weeks.

Cost: $18.

Know what a toddler needs?  An old man sweater, obviously.  I sized this pattern up a bit so that it will be large enough to fit next winter — no point risking it being a bit too small, and thus only fitting for the duration of a Texas summer.

It doesn’t get super-cold here in winter, and this is one instance where it may well have been cheaper to make this sweater than to buy one (or at least a sweater in a cozy merino-alpaca blend, like the City Tweed).

To make it more old-man-ish, I added the cheapo felt elbow patches and wooden buttons.  The buttons are spaced kind of wonkily, but who cares?  I am pretty sure that it will still be cute.

Time: A couple of hours.

Cost: Around $10 for the fabric.

Buntings — or pointy-type triangle-ish festive banners, whatever you want to call them — are well on their way to becoming the decorative cliché for children’s rooms of the 2010s, if they haven’t already officially claimed that title.

But the truth of the matter is that I have this room that needs something on the walls, and I’m too indecisive / lazy to have decided on art from Etsy. Also, this was a satisfyingly easy, cheap project requiring a minimum of fuss and fitting. I roughly followed this tutorial, though I ended up freehanding the shape of many of the triangles (which is, uh, evident in how some of them look curved and a little dropsical. I call that “character.”).

I knew that I’d have enough fabric to make a decently long bunting, so I was fine doing some improvising.  To be even more thrifty with your fabric, however, you could easily do this project and use muslin or scraps of other cotton for the backs of the triangles.

It helps that this was one of the first sewing projects that I’ve done since our move, and my sewing stuff is now set up in the guest room (with our former kitchen butcher block table acting as small cutting table).  And I have all this space to work in!  And I can even shut the door mid-project so the cats don’t walk all over everything!

With this decorative placeholder, the nursery itself is in a decent state. When we moved in, the walls were exactly the same light beige shade as the carpet, which was pretty soporific, so we got permission to paint them in a much more edgy and exciting shade of… gray. (Again, see: decorative clichés for children’s rooms of the 2010s.)  Pete and I have never bothered to paint any of our apartments before, so this felt like a Really, Really Big Deal.  It necessitated the purchase of brushes and official color approval and a big piece of plastic and everything, and we got to have one of those overly-serious conversations about twenty nearly-identical paint chip samples that you usually only see in the movies.

But I like it as a backdrop for our High IKEA-style decorating theme, so gray it stays.

Time: A couple of weeks.

Cost: Free! (I knew all of that leftover yarn would be good for something.)

Babies need hats, right? Even in Texas? This is what my sources tell me, at any rate. Happily, baby hats are totally fast, easy projects to make with small amounts of yarn that you’ve had sitting around for aeons. (I was, however, chagrined to realize that many of eligible stray odd balls of yarn were in shades of blue, setting off an unintentional precedent of gender normativity.)  But let not this knitter’s baby’s head go uncovered.

Exhibit A: the Welcome to the World Newborn Hat, worsted weight edition, in leftover bits of Cotton-Ease.

Exhibit B: the Berry Baby Hat, in more leftover Cotton-Ease and a ball of GGH Samoa left over from a larger project that I remember biking over to Lakeside Fibers for one summer. So… I’ve had it at least since 2007? About time that it became hat-ified. I made this hat in the smallest size, but it came out at least large enough to fit a one-year-old (probably because the Samoa is an Aran weight yarn). So, for the following winter, then.

Exhibit C: the Little Boy Blue Ribbed Hat, made from some leftover Malabrigo in Blue Surf.

This is the one that I’m pretty sure will actually fit, because the ribbing is incredibly stretchy, and you can fold the brim up as far as you need to. Success!

Exhibit D: the Sweet Baby Cap, converted to newborn size, and made with some leftover Stroll Tonal in Springtime and Hazel Knits Artisan Sock. Because every child should be made to wear clothing that is ever-so-slightly ridiculous.

Time: A couple of weeks.

Cost: $16.  Making your Star Wars-obsessed brother-in-law jealous?  Priceless.

I decided to make the Baby Yoda Sweater because, in theory, it could be something of a useful garment: easy to get on and off, cozy, and machine-washable.  When I showed Pete a photo of the Felted Baby Yoda Hat pattern online, however, he immediately had a strong response.  “Yes!  You should totally make that!”  Then: “Drew [his brother] is going to be so jealous!”  So, I’m not sure what the dominant motivation was, but I rarely need an excuse to buy yarn.

I had my doubts about how well the hat would felt down to size, and almost failed to snap the following “before” shot.

That would have been a grave mistake: in the “after” photos here, it’s posed on the bottom end of a drinking glass. So, it got tiny. Tiny! And it was basically one of the last things that I made before our washing machine broke — you call me when those parts come in, appliance-repair guy, because I’m going insane over here — so at least it serves as a small memorial to that beloved appliance. (Seriously, repair guy. I do not want to have to haul two weeks’ worth of stuff to a random laundromat this weekend.)

The sweater was a fast and easy knit. I made it seamless according to these instructions on Ravelry, though I wish I’d given a thought to whether or not I wanted to finish the edges before I began. I ended up doing an applied i-cord down the sides, for lack of a better idea / option.

The hat still looks really small to my eye, so we’ll see if it actually fits a real, live human baby. At least we’ll have something to torture the cats with for the next few years, however.

Time: A couple of weeks.

Cost: Under $10.

One kind of awesome, if unexpected, thing is that I feel absolutely no pressure (self-imposed or otherwise) to knit for my own prospective kid.  I’ve already made three pairs of Daphnes and Delilahs as gifts, and had no intention of making another until, after the move, two knitting projects failed catastrophically in quick succession. So, I made a quick trip to Hobby Lobby, picked out two of the brightest, happiest yarn colors I could find, and started in on some comfort knitting.

As always, I followed the pattern pretty much as written. I still have a few pairs of safety eyes left from my initial order to 6060, so I used those too; I will totally order more when I run out, because I think they’re an easy and great finishing touch for toy-type projects.

Unfortunately, one of the things that I noticed about previously-made Daphnes and Delilahs is that the felt mouths got really scrappy-looking really quickly, no matter how carefully I cut or glued or otherwise reinforced them. I think it’s just something in the nature of cheap craft-store felt. For this pair, I took a cue from some of the other finished projects on Ravelry, and sewed zig-zag mouths on with a double strand of embroidery floss. I’m sorry that I didn’t think of this technique sooner — I’m guessing that it’ll be more durable than the felt, and has the same character to it.

Time: A few evenings in front of the TV.

Cost: Dudes, I’ve had this book kicking around for so long, I have no idea.  Not much over $10, though.

Or: Create A Lovely Home with Tissue Paper and Pipe Cleaners.

Our current apartment is far too dim to support actual plant life, and Sebastian is constitutionally incapable of witnessing greenery without eating it and regurgitating it anyway.

Enter tissue paper flowers: cheaper and less fusty than artificial, and less interesting to cats.  I made these from a copy of Klutz’ now out-of-print Tissue Paper Flowers, which I love because of how it encourages wild creativity while also presenting you with some rather horticulturally correct templates.  And now, with the addition of some IKEA vases, our dim, vaguely mustard-colored entryway is properly beautified.

Navy dress: 2 yards navy ITY knit from Fashion Fabrics Club; assorted notions.  Pattern: Simplicity 2443.

Time: Three months for the sweater, and a couple of weekends for the dress.

Cost: Sweater, $50; Dress, $10.

Two!  Two!  Two projects in one post!

Given how soon our move is coming up and how little time I’ll have for crafting in the next month, I wanted to get these posted, if only to document the rapacious growth of our backyard grapevine in the background.

First up is the Dallas Hoodie, which was a project that emerged from a small knitting crisis when I realized that I cannot, in good conscience, keep knitting heavy wool and alpaca sweaters when we’re moving to a place that seems to average 100 degrees for six months out of the year.  Mind you, I’m not getting rid of the sweaters that I already have –  the Bohus will be mine forever — but it seemed like an opportune time to take my crafted wardrobe in a different direction.

Happily, I’d had the Austin Hoodie at the top of my knitting queue for some time, and realized that it’d make the perfect sweater to carry around as a light, yet warm, layer to protect myself against heavily air-conditioned buildings.  Of which there are, of course, many.

I wanted the fit of the finished sweater to be a bit closer and cropped, so I shortened the body by 1″. I also lengthened the sleeves by an inch or so, because I’ve found that (on lighter sweaters like this) they tend to ride up slightly with wear. This is an interesting and well-designed pattern, though, like many other knitters, I found that there weren’t enough picked-up stitches called for around the armhole. I ended up using some loose ends of yarn to reinforce the inside of the armhole seams for that reason.

I also ended up splurging on the recommended yarn for this project, which is a bit of an unusual move for me. A brief lesson in yarn economics: the price of your yarn scales roughly with the weight of it, not the yardage.  In other words, you’re paying for the quantity of the raw material required to make it.  So, $15 will generally buy you many more yards of skinny yarn (like this) than a heavier-weight yarn.  And, if you occasionally feel the need to shell out on some pricier material, it’ll cost you far less if you do it for a project like this one that takes a modest quantity of a lightweight yarn.  (To compare, I priced the lovely-sounding yarn recommended for a worsted-weight sweater in a book, and came up with an estimate of $240 for the entire thing.)

I deliberated about the color for some time; I was planning on using a sensible gray, but it sold out at the last minute.  I had a sudden change of heart that led me towards the Amber Trinket colorway, and I’m very happy that I followed it — not only is it a more interesting color, but the variations in tone are gorgeous without being distracting.  One of my three skeins was ever so slightly more muted in tone than the other two, so I alternated skeins throughout the body of the sweater and the hood to avoid any lines of demarcation.

Bonus: despite being wool, the yarn is soft enough to wear in hot weather without making my skin all itchy or irritated.

On to the dress!  I made Simplicity 2443 out of a knit fabric, which meant that I was able to skip the zipper installation and do much of the construction on my serger.  Functional shortcuts are so gratifying.

(Also, I’m pretty sure that grapevine will be breaking and entering into our apartment any day now.)

I’d never used an ITY knit before — I tend to be kind of suspicious of synthetics, particularly when they’re to be worn in hot weather — but boy, does it drape nicely and make my construction look far better than it has any right to.  I even ended up leaving the hem raw because it looks so dang good.

The hands-down hardest thing about this pattern is attaching the facing / strap section to the top of the bodice. It looks fine in the photo below, but there are puckers galore in the back. And honestly, I don’t really care, because it seems like it will never dip below 90 degrees in Massachusetts and I don’t currently have the benefit of air conditioning and so I will wear my dress puckers or no.

If I weren’t in the process of packing up my fabric and sewing equipment, I would be so very tempted to buy a bunch more jersey and make a few duplicates. It’s super-comfortable, cheap to make, and works well either worn casually or slightly dressed up. And it should be pretty good for hot, sunny days.

Bonus photo: our ever, ever-dignified Sebastian, showing off his freckled kitty gums and how he handles hot, sunny days.

Uncertainty and tedium are two things that I don’t do well with.  So, after a quick trip to a lunchtime vegetarian Chinese buffet (!) and $5 at Hobby Lobby later, we returned to our hotel room with a small bag of embroidery floss and proceeded to work on these:

As long as you can procure a safety pin and a pair of scissors, friendship bracelets are a surprisingly great travel craft: portable, relatively fast, airplane-friendly, instantly wearable upon completion, and can give you an excuse to channel-surf and become surprisingly absorbed in shows like Unlikely Animal Friends I and II and a quite self-explanatory Cocaine Sub Hunt.  For example.