Deadlines are my friend

The birthday madness has come and gone and yet, my LED booties are not yet complete. I need to finish the electrical part and put in the liners. I'd say they are 1/2 done. They look cute so far though, right?

Without the looming deadline of "need it for the birthday", I find that I'm less inclined to work on them in the evening. My mind has already started to wander toward thoughts of Halloween costumes and Christmas presents and "what's my little toddler into now?"

The instructions for this project are good but now that I've done this much, I have some thoughts on alterations and clarifications.

It is totally worth the time to make paper mock-ups of these shoes before you cut out fabric and start sewing. I am the sort of crafter that eyeballs measurements, estimates yardage and never ever knits the gauge swatches before starting the sweater. That said, if I hadn't taken the time to stitch together the paper pattern, I'd have had to make two pair of shoes. The pattern is designed for very little babies, not a monster like I have.

I had to enlarge the pattern quite a bit to get the shoes to fit, but this caused them to be loose around the top. I know the instructions call for an elastic strap to help keep them on the foot. Instead of this, I ran a ribbon through the yellow top (my Mom is wicked clever!). Now, I can cinch the booties around Buttercup's ankle. This won't keep her from pulling them off, but it does make them fit better for the short time she allows her feet to be covered.

I'm still trying to work out how the stitchable LEDs work. I can tell you that merely sewing them in place with the conductive thread doesn't seem to do the trick, unless I'm just doing it wrong. In the meantime, I used regular ol' 5mm yellow LEDs and bent the legs. These LEDs use 3 volt batteries and what I didn't realize at the time was that 3 volts come in a variety of shapes and sizes. The directions don't tell you this. I used Energizer 2016s for this project because they were the flattest of the 3 volts (important since Buttercup will be walking on them). They are also quite large which gives me plenty of area to stitch the conductive thread to without making that area so big that the positive and negatives come in contact. As the directions point out, it's very bad when you cross the streams. It creates a short in the circuit and then things don't work properly.

Conductive thread is a bit of a pain to work with. I used the 4 ply thread and am glad I did because the cheaper 2 ply supposedly unravels like crazy (check out the user comments on the 2 ply page). The 4 ply unravels quite a bit too, so I can't imagine how frustrating the 2 ply would be to work with. My stitching is just not good enough to hide all the conductive threads on the bottom, so I've given up trying. What I will do is add a non-slip pad to the bottoms of the shoes when I'm done. It will cover up all the stitches and will make it easier for Buttercup to motor around my tile and wood floors.

I have not sewn the liner in yet and to be honest, I would recommend doing that last after all the other stitching is done. It's hard enough to sew in little shoes, let alone try to do that sewing with a liner in the way.

Anyway, I'll be sure to post when they are finished. I can't wait too long, or they won't fit her anymore and I'll have to start all over again.