Tuesday, June 3, 2014

Baby Shoes




These little feet took their first step a few weeks ago! Ever since they have been taking a few unsure steps a day, but I'm sure they will be full-on running soon.

So things around here have been a bit silent recently. Things around here have also been busy. We moved to the US!! We still aren't settled at all, as in Y has yet to move into our new house, but he did find one! In the meantime, the little boys and I are staying at my parents' house. It has been glorious! I have been taking a little vacation from just about everything, including the blog. But, hopefully I will get back into the swing of things and blog every once in a while.

Anyway, before we left T started standing. It was fine when we were inside our house, but when we went to the park, he wanted to stand, too. When we went to the store, he wanted to chill in the play area with his big brother. Since we didn't have much time to go shopping, I looked online for shoes for him, but I couldn't find any. The smallest I found was 11.5 cm, but he was more like 9.5 or 10 cm. Dude was only 8 months old. Since I couldn't find any, I figured I'd just make them.

I looked online for a little shoe pattern and found this one. Since it looked slightly small, I scaled it up slightly.


Since I wanted T to be able to walk outside in these, I wanted the bottoms to be leather. I didn't have any leather scraps, so I went to my 100yen store (oh how I have been missing this shop) and picked up a leather business card case.


When I got home, I started cutting it up to get some leather for the soles.


Then I sewed the leather soles onto the fabric sole.


I wanted the shoes to have some sort of design, so I zig zagged a little light blue patch on the front.


Then I sewed the two halves of the back of the shoe together. If I were to do these shoes again, I would have picked a different fabric - this one was an interior weight, which was fine, but as you can see in the photo below the weave was pretty loose. It started fraying after a few wears, which was a tad disappointing.


The other thing I would have done would be to make one bigger piece for this back bit and just fold it over. This is where the most of the fraying started to happen, exposing the elastic that was put in during the next step.


Then I sewed the fabric again to make a casing for the elastic.


Then I attached the front to the back and sewed them both to the soles.


I think they looked adorable, but as above they started to fray. They were also slightly small after a week or two. In the end, they didn't last too long. But once we got to my parents' house, my mom went out and bought him a pair. Now he is taking those little steps in style!



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