hey maryjane

Cro­chet­ing these san­dals made me want to fur­ther inves­ti­gate whether home­made shoes are a viable solu­tion for my odd­ly shaped, high arch, achy feet. So I thought I’d make anoth­er pair in a dif­fer­ent style :D pos­si­bly some­thing for dai­ly casu­al wear.

I came across this pat­tern from Hook Can­dy on Rav­el­ry and real­ly liked how shoe-like they are. I did­n’t want some­thing that would make it look like I’m wear­ing slip­pers out on the street.

I just used the same yarn as the san­dals because I had a lot of the yarn left over. Used the left over jute as well for the soles and treat­ed it as per the instruc­tions from Wild­flow­ers and Sage’s pat­tern to make them out­doors ready. And the insoles were made with some left­over Bernat cot­ton from anoth­er project.

Photo 2016-07-06, 2 25 25 PM

I’m quite hap­py with them! :D I did­n’t have to mod­i­fy the pat­tern at all to make them accom­mo­date the width of my feet. I did have to add an extra round of sin­gle cro­chet stitch­es to increase the height of the sides and heels so they don’t feel like they’re falling off my feet, and used dou­ble strand of yarn for the entire shoe to make it feel a bit stur­dier. They were very com­fort­able when I walked around with them at home.

Photo 2016-07-06, 2 23 34 PM

Photo 2016-07-06, 2 24 03 PM

The oth­er day I took them out for a test run and wore them to work.

Photo 2016-07-11, 8 13 33 AM

After walk­ing on them for a while the tex­ture of the cot­ton insoles start­ed to both­er my feet. It was quite lumpy, and there was a knot in the jute sole that I did­n’t hide and flat­ten very well, and at the end of the day it was dig­ging into my foot and became a bit painful… (man I sound like the princess in princess and the pea…) and the lack of arch sup­port was a prob­lem as well. So when I got home I put in a pair of foam insoles and tried them on again, they felt much bet­ter. I’ll take them out again anoth­er day. It would be so nice if I could just make my own shoes from now on and do away shoe shop­ping forever!

Hap­py Wednes­day, everybody!