Along with making my first pair of socks a few months ago, I got to tick off another First this weekend when my friend Sophie came over and we made shoes! These actually weren’t her first pair of shoes – last year she took an intensive shoe-making class where she got to use lasts and industrial shoe-specific sewing machines, but making espadrilles using home-friendly methods was new for us both.

I’ve been wanting to make shoes for a while, encouraged by other sewists like Jasika who make very professional-looking shoes that you’d actually want to wear! So when the opportunity arose to choose some Prym products (aka Dritz in the US) to try out, their espadrille-making supplies were high on my list, and they kindly provided the soles in my size (EU40) as well as in EU37 and EU45 for good measure. The other sizes, miraculously, correspond to Sophie’s shoe size and James’s, so they’ll all get put to good use!