I found a few minutes to work on my baby spats pattern after work yesterday.  Milad and Omar were at the park, and I had left-over spanikopita casserole all ready to heat up and serve for dinner, so I didn’t have to slave away in the kitchen.  So I cut out my paper spats pattern and a muslin version and sewed it all together.  Then I sewed up all the seams with as much seam allowance as I reckon I’ll do on the finished piece.  This proved useful.  I can see that my guesstimates for the button overlap and seam allowances are way off.  In fact, the pieces just match up along the edge that ought to overlap.  It should be easy to figure out how much to overlap for the button holes, though.

And I think I may want to make them taller.  This version will be a good height for a shoe.  It is just about ankle height.  I didn’t get to try it on Omar yet.  A taller version would be cute for a girl, I think.  Spatterdashes were intended to keep water from getting into the shoes, so they were generally above the ankle in days of yore.  I see no need to stick to that formula, though, as these are for fashion only. A low spat might look better on a boy, I suspect.  I may make both versions.

I also worked a little more on the deceivingly simple-looking cloth baby shoes.  The dim and doubtful aspects of the pattern instructions are causing me quite a bit of consternation. I bought some felt for the soles, and cut and sewed those pieces together.  I read the directions from the package for the iron-on interfacing.  They are far from clear.  So I re-read all the directions for the shoes.  I think I have misunderstood them.  I now think that perhaps lining and interfacing are referring to two different materials.  At first I thought they might be the same thing by a different name.  But judging from the pictures, the lining seems to be a distinctly different, decorative fabric, and not like the interfacing stuff that I have purchased.  So I cut out another set of fabric pieces to use as lining.  But the pictures don’t seem to show the interfacing from what I can tell, either, so I’m still not sure that I’m understanding this correctly.

And assuming they just left off the interfacing in the picture, I’m still a bit confused about whether I should apply the interfacing to the outside fabric only, or to both the outside fabric and the lining fabric.  (This is not mentioned in detail in the instructions – just a brief line noting to interface the shoe upper but not the sole.) Perhaps this is obvious to somebody who is more experienced than myself, a self-taught beginner?

It seems like it will be quite bulky if I apply it to both pieces.  This may not be much of an issue with these shoes since they ought to be sturdy, I suppose.  But I would like to know for my own general reference and personal knowledge for future projects whether I ought to always interface the lining as well as the outer fabric.  Is there a rule to this, or is it pattern-specific?

There’s a good chance I won’t figure this out before I proceed with the pattern.  So I’ll probably just choose to line both sides or just one and see how it goes.  As Mark Twain said of experience in “Tom Sawyer Abroad, “…the person that had took a bull by the tail once had learnt sixty or seventy times as much as a person that hadn’t, and said a person that started in to carry a cat home by the tail was getting knowledge that was always going to be useful to him, and warn’t ever going to grow dim or doubtful.”  If I hadn’t started re-reading this thing, I would have placidly interfaced the fabric and finished off the shoe without any lining.  But now I’m in a dither about whether to interface the lining or not.  Bother!  No wonder I have so many unfinished projects – I think about it too much.  I just need to take the bull by the tail, I suppose.