Unplugged Challenge:Clothing

We were reading the book, First Biographies:Sacagawea and when we came to the description of the Shoshone men taking off their moccasins during negotiations with Lewis and Clark, as a sign that any promise made would be kept (according to the book, this meant that if you did break a promise, you would go barefoot forever), Blaze ran from the room to find his moccasins. What we discovered, though, was that he had grown out of his moccasins. They were way too small.
Suddenly we had a project for this week's "Unplugged Challenge", which has the theme of "clothing". We would try our hands at shoe making.



There is a vendor at the Medieval faire every year, who sells small paper bags stuffed full of scrap leather for $3, and every year I end up buying one incase I need it for some craft project, so now I have a box full of odd shaped leather pieces in a variety of colors.



I ended up choosing black leather for Blaze's new moccasins only because there were larger pieces of black leather in the box.

I designed the new moccasins by looking at the old out-grown ones.



I started by tracing Blaze's feet on paper and then cutting out the pattern about a centimeter bigger than the tracings.



I punched holes in the leather to make it easier for Blaze to sew ( it gave me something to do while Blaze was in therapy on Tuesday).



Blaze did all the sewing and cut the fringe. I taped the leather to a piece of paper and marked a line on the paper to show where to stop cutting, so the fringe would be even.

We used black embroidery floss for the sewing, which may not hold up as well as the sinew that is supposed to be used, but it meant that we already had all the supplies we needed.
















I think this would work just as well with felt as it did with the leather.