Mama's Milk Bottle Cover--Instant Gratification #2

If the ladies at MotheringDotCommune are to be believed, some women are hesitant to give Baby a bottle of expressed breastmilk in public for fear other nursing mamas will assume it's formula. Not something I can identify with, but something I can sympathize with. (For the record, I assume that everyone is feeding expressed breastmilk, so that my happy place stays happy.) There are apparently some glass bottles out there that say "Mother's Milk" or some such on them. I have long wanted to come up with an alternative, a crocheted bottle cover with "Mommy's Milk" or "breastmilk" or some such embroidered on it.

I must confess, I don't get bottle covers. Of three kids, only one of them was ever willing to take a bottle, and she only did so for about two months, one bottle a day while I was at work. (She eventually decided she'd rather wait & get it straight from the tap.) I have long been opposed to bottle covers in general; I see their prevalence as one more subtle push of formula feeding. That, and I really don't understand what they're for. I mean, I realize they're to cover baby bottles. But why? Maybe it's part of the innate drive to crochet a cozy for anything and everything you come across.

So, this is the final result. (Well, semi-final, I'm going to crochet another one where the yarns contrast better.) The project was in some ways much harder than I expected. The cover itself was simple enough--there's no bottom on it as I didn't want to chance unbalancing the bottle, so it's a mere 12 rounds including the trim--but it was more difficult than I had anticipated to get something embroidered on it.

See, when you hold a bottle, so much of it is covered up by your hand. (In my happy place, no one props bottles either.) I wanted to have only half the cover taken up by the embroidery. So Mama's Milk & Breastmilk were both out. I settled on this:

I don't know if that's even readable, much as I messed around with the contrast, but it says Milkies. This is a fairly common shorthand for nursing/breastmilk. Even so, it takes up slightly more than half the bottle cover, and in all honesty I think if you have something like this it's more for yourself than any theoretically judgmental strangers. So it's OK.

I'll be posting the pattern soon at my patterns site & will post here when it's up. It's 1:36 am as I type this, so I need to go to bed & get some sleep. It only took me an hour to make this, and that's with having to frog a couple of times, stop repeatedly to check the fit on the bottle, and jot down the pattern as I was crocheting. So it's a fast, fast project--hence being Instant Gratification #2.

Even without the embroidery, it might make a good gift for any exclusive pumper or working nursing mama you know, and it's a stash-buster. I used a 4oz Soothie bottle for the fitting, but I believe Avent bottles to be much the same size. (My first two were so insulted by Avent bottles that I never tried giving one to Esther, so I've none in the house.) At any rate, it is sized for the wider bottles that breastfeeding mamas tend to use.