Finding My Inner Cobbler

 

Several months ago, my quilt guild announced a class coming up in November on making quilted sneakers. My brain exploded! Making Quilted Sneakers!! I HAVE to do that. I already loved handmade and custom-made shoes. In fact, I own two pairs. The idea of walking around in the world in fabulous sneakers (yes, mine would be fabulous!) that I made myself just rocked. I signed up on the spot.

 A prodigious amount of work had to be completed before the actual class, and I undertook it with relish. First challenge, acquire the shoe kit. The kits are not readily available, but Tandy Leather sells them, so I went to the local shop. The shoe is sized in four ways: American men, European men, European women, and finally American women.

 Because of the sizing, all the American woman shoes are half-sizes, so my size 10s were going to have to settled for 10½s. And I would have to wait several weeks for the order to arrive at my local store or pay an exorbitant sum for shipping. Spoiled by Amazon Prime, I waited.

 When I opened the box, I found the inner and outer soles, three different patterns for the uppers, and very basic instructions. The patterns included a high-cut, mid-cut, and low-cut silhouette for the uppers. If I made a quilted fabric, I wanted as much of it as possible to show, so I went right for the high-cut pattern.

 Now, to design and construct the quilted fabric. I spent a lot of time thinking about what parts of the quilt would show on the sneakers. It would have to be a small pattern, meaning that I would have to sew even smaller pieces of fabric together to create the look I wanted. After lots of quilt bingeing, I decided to make a pinwheel design.

 Each pinwheel consisted of a square made from eight pieces of fabric sewn together. I needed to make 25 pinwheels to have a large enough quilt. And—this is tricky—I needed the two shoes to be mirror images of each other as much as possible. Planning the layout required contemplation and, ultimately, a little help from my friendly Copilot AI to do calculations.

 I had raided my fabric stash and discovered forgotten riches: an ombre charm pack in coordinated jewel tone colors. (A charm pack, for non-quilters, is a selection of precut five-inch squares. Ombre simply means that the colors graduate from light to dark.) Copilot told me didn't have quite enough, but with a little more searching, I found extra pieces that blended in.

 Each square had to be cut into four 2½” pieces, matched to 2½” white pieces and sewn back together into 5” squares that now looked like pinwheels. It took some time, but the final product pleased me. Quilting is kind of magical even when you know what’s behind the curtain!

 

Before I sewed all those pinwheels together, I looked at my pattern and figured out how the fabric would actually fit on the shoes and plotted, as best I could, the optimum layout for the project. It should have been straightforward, but it never seems to be. I ripped out a lot of seams and turned a lot of squares around before I got everything in the right place. But, finally, success!

 The actual class took place last Wednesday. Me and my handy-dandy knee scooter showed up with Michael schlepping my sewing machine and a large tote bag of paraphernalia. The classroom space was cramped and I was oversized, but friendly classmates helped me make it work. Crafting the shoes took patience and attention to detail. There were do-overs aplenty. Hand sewing through the layers of quilted fabric and the rubber soles took tremendous strength and concentration. My right thumb tip is still numb 5 days later!

 In the course of that day, I only managed to finish one shoe, but I had the foresight to create a LEFT shoe. Since my right foot is encased in a boot for the foreseeable future, that's all I need. I left the class a very happy camper!

Tschüß (Tschüss)

P.S. I would not recommend trying this without a qualified teacher. There are some extremely tricky parts and other parts that are not intuitive at all.