"I'm entering a Booty competition!" "A What??"

I'm married, and I want babies. I'm excited to be a mama. My husband is excited for that day also. That day is a couple years away still... but a couple years is how long we've been married and those have pretty much flown by so it feels like we'll probably be starting our family tomorrow. This fact is simultaneously exciting and terrifying. In my infinite wisdom as not-yet-a-mother, I think I'll be capable, and I think I know what to expect. I expect to experience sciatic pain, stretch marks, hernias, irritability, screeching discomfort and nausea during pregnancy. I expect not to sleep for a year after the baby is born. I expect to experience post partum depression. I expect to be overwhelmed and scared and freaked out. I expect difficulty and mistakes. I half-expect learning disabilities, physical disabilities, and the heartache and hard work that accompany these things. These expectations understandably dampen my excitement, but inexplicably - the excitement is still there. I won't dwell on the positives I forsee... and I don't think I'd be able to list what I look forward to even if I tried - it's just not as easily quantifiable.

I'm glad we're going to wait a while longer. I'm a pretty big fan of living alone with my honey baby sweetie pie. I'm not in a rush to enter motherhood. This does not, however, preclude me from being delighted by other people's babies and baby-things. Being that I was the first of all my friends to get married, and thus even beginning to contemplate motherhood, there is no immediate supply of babies for me to squidge. BUT! Combine my planning and organizational inclinations with my baby feet craving and you'll find me sitting for hours working on the minute details of a baby bootie that I'm going to put away in a box so that when I finally expel a wrinkled lizardy baby from my loins, she'll already have an assortment of fabulous footwear.


I officially have Baby Bootie Fever. Soon after I started working on a slew of these in all different flavors, I found a post on www.craftzine.com about Michael Miller Fabrics sponsoring a Baby Bootie competition. The timing is ridiculous. I immediately started brainstorming for it. I wanted to come up with a baby bootie so detailed that people might contemplate suggesting I get medicated, and so sweet that you can get a cavity just from looking.

I spent two weeks laboring and this is what came of it:

(Click for a closer look - Believe me it's worth it)

These babies have micro suede soles with machine stitching in a bright happy pink. The inside sole is lined with green fleece to be extra soft and warm for baby toes. The inside of the bootie is lined with a cotton watermelon print fabric. The outside is pink felt with hand embroidered watermelon seeds. I have a disease wherein if I come up with an idea for a little detail or addition to a project I'm working on - I MUST DO IT. If I thought of it, it will be done or I will perish trying. When I thought up the notion of a watermelon baby bootie, it was obviously going to have little watermelon seeds. Originally, I bought little shiny round buttons to represent a couple of them - possibly as a means of fastening the bootie around the delectable baby ankle. But no - couldn't do that, because who's ever seen a perfectly round watermelon seed? They don't exist! People might be confused and think I sewed up a brightly colored petri dish with a couple of black button deer ticks for good measure. So as to be sure that everyone knew they were watermelon seeds, I should probably sew them up myself. It won't take long! They're just tiny little seeds! No big deal.

It took 10 hours.

10 hours of stitching teeny tiny perfect black stitches into perfect little seeds. At some point it stopped looking like a watermelon, and started looking like strawberry chocolate chip ice cream.

The Rind is two layers of green felt that was machine stitched together. Then I hand sewed the whole thing up. First, the top to the sole. Then a line of blanket stitching around the top, then the rind to the sole, then the rind to the body.

I can't remember how long this thing took me - possibly because part of the time I was drooling and deliriously craving strawberry chocolate chip ice cream. I CAN say that I'm happy with them - Just looking at them makes me start talking baby talk. I'm proud of my work and thus submitted it to the competition. There are a lot of cute booties in there. I don't know what my chances are to win or even to place. I'm nervous, and twitchy, and anxious. This is the first craft competition I've entered and 1) I'm competitive, 2) I put everything I had into these booties.

I couldn't have done more. The results won't be announced till the end of June.

Hold me.