Me Made Made Day 17 - Espadrilles!

Yay for sunny days and handmade shoes.

These are made with some lovely Sevenberry Cactus fabric and a peppered cotton lining and the prym espadrille soles. 

A nice easy project for either a machine sewer or a hand stitched, sew a few pieces of fabric together with some interfacing and then sew them onto the bases. Each shoe isn’t a quick make though, I think probably about 5 hrs total of them both but this depends if you are hand stitching or not. But a very satisfying sew.

With mine I did add some elastic into the heel of the lining fabric so that they don’t slip off my heels easily as I have quite narrow heels but wide feet and they are great.

The hardest part is the sewing of the top part onto the soles and getting the right size needle so it’s not too think but strong enough to get through the sole, I also weirdly like the stage where you have lots of pins sticking into the sole to hold the fabric onto the base, it looks kind cool but you have to be quite careful your not stabbing yourself!

I think my main tip making these would be to make sure when you have your templates cut out in the tissue paper make sure minus your seam allowances that they meet in the middle, so they need to go all the way around your heel and over you toes. Unlike some of these we had in a workshop where the sizes were mixed up by mistake and we have one too large and one too small, but we improvised and it worked out in the end!

Really comfortable and cool in the summer and a simple sewing project. I look forward to seeing lots of espadrille photos soon 😊