Baby Shoes
Baby shoes are a silly invention. Babies don’t need shoes. And even the smallest, newest, barely mobile baby will only keep a shoe on his foot for a minute or two before he manages to wiggle out of it. That said, baby shoes are adorable and one has to have them. I was at Bolt (http://www.boltfabricboutique.com/), buying the fabric for the wall-hangings (see, Yes, Billy. Super Glue does stick to everything…) and they had these tiny kimono baby shoes on the counter. The “awwwwwwww….” factor was amazing and I quickly picked up more fabric so that I could make them for Tiny Hockey Fan (pattern at http://www.homespun-threads.com/patterns/kimonoshoes.pdf).
The irony is, I don’t sew. I have a sewing machine that I begged for as a graduation present from college. I had grand plans to make all sorts of stuff. I made a couple of curtains, and then it went into the closet. Here in Portland, it’s been up in my “office” (read: room I toss of my crap into so I don’t have to organize it neatly).
But I saw the shoes and figured, “how hard can it be?”
Keep in mind, the nice lady at Bolt warned me that the shoes were a little bit tricky, due to the fact that one had to make sure one arranged the fabric properly to get the one shoe to wrap right and one shoe to wrap left. No problem, I figured. ”How hard can it be?” So I hauled the sewing machine down, the better to hang out with Hockey Fan while he… well, watched hockey, and got to work.
Problem #1: I didn’t know how to thread my sewing machine properly. The thread would knot up, tangle, and leave a thick, unsightly seam. Luckily, I have a consulting source at work. She told me what she thought the problem was (that I wasn’t loading the bobbin thread correctly). I checked the manual. She was right. You’d have thought that I’d have read the manual in the first place when I realized that something wasn’t working, but I’m sort of like a guy that way.
Problem #2: I don’t know how to pin things properly. I almost broke the foot of my sewing machine twice before I realized I had run them in the wrong direction.
Problem #3: I can’t follow a pattern line to save my life. I tried. I really, really did. But no matter how many times I backtracked, seam ripped, no matter how slowly I ran the sewing machine, I was always off just a little bit. This resulted in oddly shaped shoes that didn’t match AT ALL.
Problem #4: I lined them up perfectly so that one would wrap right and one would wrap left. I was certain. I was POSITIVE. I had no doubts. And when I pulled the second one off of the machine, they both wrapped right.
Between pair #1 (the cat pair) and pair #2 (the skull pair), I managed to solve problem #1 and problem #4. And mostly problem #2, though I did give myself a nice bruise on the finger when I jumped the one pin that was in the wrong direction and I got caught between the foot and the screw that holds the foot on.
Still haven’t solved problem #3. Even on pair #2, though one wraps right and one wraps left, they are totally different sizes. They look like two totally different shoes.
I hope Tiny Hockey Fan realizes that they were made with love, even if they are lopsided and funny looking.
