Baby Button Boots Pattern/Tutorial

Here is the first of my written up baby shoes patterns. I started with my favourite, and also the one that is freshest in my mind. As you can see, there is a slight mismatch between the boots themselves and their chosen name. They as yet have no buttons attached. I'm planning to add a velcro closure and sew buttons onto the tabs down the upper portion of the boot. I just don't have any suitable buttons at the moment, so you will have to use your imagination.

ButtonBoots Instructions

ButtonBoots Pattern

To make the boots as pictured above, download these two PDFs and off you go. Please note, I'm not a professional pattern writer so I apologise if I've missed anything important. I tried to be as thorough as possible and included plenty of photos.

Sizing wise, I'd guess these are about 3-6 month size. Again, I'm sorry if this isn't quite accurate. My son was a big baby, so my estimations of sizes are probably skewed a bit to the large size.

Good luck to anyone that finds and attempts these boots, I'd love to see what people come up with and any hear thoughts on the design and pattern and will endeavour to answer any questions as best I can.

My new passion - Sewing baby shoes.

So, since my lovely husband bought me a fancy new sewing machine for my birthday, I’ve been getting into sewing a bit more. It has been great fun being able to attempt projects that require more finesse than my grandma’s old machine would allow. With that I was limited to straight stitch at approximately light-speed. This made it very difficult to manoeuvre small objects or follow curves and the like. So now with my new beast I decided to try making baby shoes.

Little Man Shoes at Shwin and Shwin

This great tutorial was my inspiration. Being the proud mother of a little man, I’m always on the lookout for neat things to make for little boys. There is an abundance of pink and frilly on the interwebs, but boy stuff is more difficult to find. I think these are just gorgeous, and BONUS!! the tutorial is thorough and fully illustrated which always makes things more fun.

Being a cheap-o crafter and a smarty-pants, I decided to try and make the above using 2nd hand mens ties instead of going and getting lost at the fabric shop. I altered the pattern a fair bit to make it possible to get the pieces out of a tie, and to make the finished product look slightly “tie-ish” (if that makes any sense at all). I intend to draw up the pattern I used properly in case anyone else wants to duplicate my finished shoes, but for the moment I’m just putting up pictures of the finished products.

After my first 2 tries at tie-shoes, I thought they were still looking a little on the girly side so I tried my had and making my own totally different baby shoe pattern. I was trying for a retro kind of bowling-shoe or dance shoe or something. I’m sort of happy with the result, though the pattern needs tweaking a bit still. I ended up making one pair with a tie, and another from some scrap fabric I had laying around from my Tepee project.

The last 4 photos in the gallery show my latest project, which I am so pleased with. These baby boots I totally made up from scratch, inspired by a pair of baby boots I saw at the Christchurch Museum. The original boots had the added ka-pow factor of lacy trip and rope detail, but I’m still trying for gender neutral at least so I kept my first pair plain.

So yeah, that’s my new project obsession. I’m flitting between sewing shoes and knitting baby things for our imminent new arrive and for my niece/nephew to be. My plan is to write up the patterns and instructions for these 3 different designs of shoes and release them here (for anyone that happens to be reading) as I find the time. I hope someone sees them and likes them as much as I do. If not, never mind. I had fun anyway.

The last 4 photos in the gallery show my latest project, which I am so pleased with. These baby boots I totally made up from scratch, inspired by a pair of baby boots I saw at the Christchurch Museum. The original boots had the added ka-pow factor of lacy trip and rope detail, but I'm still trying for gender neutral at least so I kept my first pair plain. So yeah, that's my new project obsession. I'm flitting between sewing shoes and knitting baby things for our imminent new arrive and for my niece/nephew to be. My plan is to write up the patterns and instructions for these 3 different designs of shoes and release them here (for anyone that happens to be reading) as I find the time. I hope someone sees them and likes them as much as I do. If not, never mind. I had fun anyway.

Beanbag

This week's project was a beanbag to eventually go up to Oscar's bedroom. Until the rest of that is all sorted, it will stay down in the lounge with all his books. I found this cute pattern through Pinterest, though the original tutorial page doesn't seem to exist any more the cached pattern PDF download can be found by doing a quick google for "micheal miller bean bag chair tutorial" (at the point of writing this anyway). There are 2 versions; kiddy size and adult size. I made up the kids one using a $2 op-shop king sized sheet, a metre of winnie the pooh fabric and some calico scraps that I had lying around. Here's the result:

Finished, complete with cover

Oscar assuming the maximum relaxation position:

If I made one again, I'd add more beans. 100L just isn't quite enough for a firm beanbag and now that the inner lining is sewn closed I can't add more to this one without considerable effort. Still pretty happy with the outcome and looking forward to reading many stories from here.

Play Tepee

For Christmas this year I made a tepee for Oscar. It took me a few evenings to muddle out a plan and another week or so to sew it up during nap times. I wrote down a crude set of instructions on how to make one for a couple of friends, and thought I'd share here in case there's anyone following my exploits that wants to have a go. The instructions are rough, but hopefully are enough to give an understanding of the process.

Hexagonal Based Tepee (PDF)

The final product, as presented to the wee man on Christmas morning: