Quiet Book: Page Three

Next up we have the shoe. This page has two purposes: one is to practice tying a shoe, and the other is to practice lacing. The pictures I looked at for inspiration had the shoe facing the other way, with the toe of the show at the bottom of the page. However, I faced my shoe this way, because that's the way a shoe faces when you are tying it on your own foot. The things I thought about when making this book even astound me sometimes.

Sorry about the blurry photo

This one was a little trickier, and took some though as to what order things needed to be attached in. First of all, I wasn't sure about making the holes for the laces. In a lot of the pictures I looked at people had used eyelets, but I didn't have an eyelet tool, and I didn't want this to turn into a really expensive project. I began experimenting with hole punching the felt, but there was no reinforcement around the hole, and it was so close to the edge, that it was easy to rip. I also tried making an eyelet on my sewing machine. Again, it really wasn't as strong as I would like. Enter Walmart. They had a package of 36 eyelets, with the tools you needed for $2. I figured I would try it. It came with the eyelets, a tool for punching a hole to put the eyelet in, and a tool for flattening the back of the eyelet once it's through the hole. It worked surprisingly well for $2. I did have some trouble with the hole punching part on the felt, so I just used the one that came with my sewing machine. The only thing I had to provide was a hammer(have 3 of those) and a hard surface. Note: your dinning room table is not a hard surface(I learned that the hard way). I ended up using my kitchen countertop. You also may want a time when no one is around, because the banging can be a little loud. Note: this is not a craft to do while your child is napping(I did not learn that the hard way). I did have one casualty when putting in the eyelets from pounding a little too long (see top left eyelet in picture below).

The eyelets do leave a bit of a rough edge on the back, where they fold over, so I did two layers of felt, each with eyelets that lined up, and then sewed them together so that the rough edges of each were facing in. The difficulty I had in this was that the eyelets make the felt thicker, and because they were so close to the edge, I had trouble sewing around them. I would probably move them around more next time.

Here's a picture of the inside of the shoe. I did not sew the tongue down all the way around, so that it would more resemble a shoe. Also, my tongue is a little crooked. The shoelace I got from my father's stash. I chose one that was the right length to lace up and still have plenty to tie. It ended up being longer then I initially thought it would need to be in order to do that. It didn't have a partner so I didn't feel bad stealing it. My mom suggested that I tack the shoelace down in the middle at the bottom of where it laces up, so that you could still lace the shoe, but so that the shoelace couldn't come out and get lost. I forgot. Also, I apparently can't measure as well as I thought I could because originally I designed the shoe to go straight up and down, but it wouldn't fit on the page, which is why it's on an angle.