Mini Moc madness!

I sewed up two more pairs of Mini Mocs last night. The ones on the right are made out of the gray wool from the same sweater I've already used to make a previous pair of Mini Mocs and two pairs of longies. That one sweater went a long way! It's finally gone, though :)

The ones on the left are denim, lined with fleece. The denim is from some old pairs of jeans of mine. For some reason, these days, I am always getting holes in the knees of my jeans. I think it has to do with having kids and crawling around down on the floor a lot more. Anyway, last summer, I had three or four pairs of jeans with holes in the knees, and only one pair of jean shorts. So I cut off the jeans and hemmed them to make jean shorts. They don't look great (jeans are much tighter on the thighs than actual jean shorts...) but they're functional.

That project left me with a bunch of scraps of denim. I saved them, thinking surely I could find some use for them. And I finally did! :) For the topstitching on these Mini Mocs, I used the same thread that I used on the hems of my "new" jean shorts. I got it at Wal-mart. It's the same brownish-yellow color as the thread that is used on the stitching for actual jeans, and it's stronger than normal thread to hold up while sewing thick denim. It works well and looks good.

Here's a close-up of the heel of the shoe, showing the stitching. I used the inside seam of the jeans on the heel, mostly because it was hard to find a wide-enough strip of material that did not have a seam :) But I think it looks cute, too!

I did goof a little while sewing these, and the shoe on the right in the first picture above is noticeably narrower than the one on the left. This is because I did leather soles (on the denim shoes and also the wool ones), and you can't really pin leather. That makes it tricky to get all the layers of fabric lined up correctly so that you can get the right seam allowance. It's also tricky to get the right seam allowance when you're sewing on a curve, as you have to do with shoes. So I ended up stitching a little too far from the edge of the sole on that shoe, resulting in it being narrower than it should. I think I may redo it when I get the chance, since I still have plenty of denim left!

I should mention that I purchased special leather sewing needles and heavy thread to use for sewing these soles on to the shoes. Those supplies are easy to find at Joann's.

Once I redo that one denim shoe, I think I'm done with shoes for a while. At least until Noob outgrows these shoes and needs new ones :)