The Craftiest Workshop

The weather has been nice this week but there is still a lot of snow on the ground in most places. It was hard to snowshoe as the snow collapses as you step. It was a good week for building a snowman. I thought perhaps I would get a photo or two of birds sitting on their outstretched arms but no such luck.

That was Monday. By Tuesday morning, a squirrel took out the pinecone eyes looking for seeds and the Blue Jays ate the peanut noses. By the end of the week, the heads had pretty much melted and all that was left was one arm sticking out of one of the two snowmen.

With not much to do outside, I had to come up with an indoor project.
I was feeling a bit nostalgic as I worked on my indoor project this week. When I was growing up, we had crocheted booties on all our dining room and kitchen chairs. My grandmother crocheted them for us if I remember correctly. At the time I assumed they were put on the chairs purely as decoration but the reality is that it is hard to protect floors from chair scratching or scraping without some sort of protection.

We have had numerous different chairs in our home and I always struggled to find ways to protect the floors from chair feet while allowing the chairs to move easily across the floor. The sticky felt pads do work but often fall off and collect hair and lint. We have bought some plastic bottomed caps with rubber to grip onto the chair but they only fit certain chair types.

With no knitting project on the go, I decided to create some booties for our dining room chairs this week. It was easy enough to come up with a pattern. I just needed the circumference to be wide enough to wrap around the chair leg and then I needed it to decrease to a point to create the bottom. Here is what I came up with.

I used medium weight yarn and 3.0mm knitting needles.

Cast on 16 St

Row 1-9: knit. If you lose count of rows, just make sure the beginning tail and working yarn end up at opposite ends. Two more rows won’t matter.

Decrease

Row 10: k1, *k2tog, k3, repeat from *(13)

Row 11: knit (13)

Row 12: k1, *k2tog, k2, repeat from * (10)

Row 13: knit (10)

Row 14: *k1, k2tog, repeat from *, k1 (7)

Row 15: k2tog (3 times), k1 (4)

Yarn over and pull each stitch over the yarn over stitch and off the needle. Cut the yarn from your working yarn leaving about 10”. Pull the yarn over stitch out through the stitches and pull tight.

Weave the tail up the side of the boot using a darning needle to form the side.

Weave both ends around the top; this will allow you to tighten it if you have a narrow chair leg. I decided to tie the two ends in a knot to keep it tight.

Here is my finished boot.

Here is what the four booties look like on one of our chairs.

I cut small pieces of cardboard to match the shape and size of the bottom of each chair leg and placed the cardboard inside each boot. We have an eclectic mismatch of chairs currently and the booties fit the different legs just fine. One chair has square legs and another quite narrow but the booties fit just the same.

I am thinking about making sets of 16 to use seasonally. Perhaps a varigated yarn with fall colours and another for Christmas with red, green and white.

It is too early to say how these booties will fair after a wash but they were easy enough to make. I would say 45min-1hr for 4 boots and it uses very little yarn.
A great way to use up leftover scrap yarn.