Shoe Tidy

I have been having great fun making things for the house. We had lots of trouble with shoes in the hallway so I have made a shoe tidy to hang on the wall. We did look at buying a shoe cabinet from IKEA, although some of them are very shallow they would still have taken up quite a lot of space in the hallway as it is quite narrow. The fabric tidy hanging on the wall isn't too intrusive.

I had a lovely piece of stripy fabric in white, purple, green and grey, is a good furnishing fabric and should take the wear and tear of being used for shoes, unfortunately I didn't have enough to make the whole tidy, but then it was just a remnant from a charity shop. I used this fabric for the pockets and found a piece in purple, from my stash, to use as the backing, this fabric isn't as hard wearing, but should do the job, my stash of purple fabric is finally getting some use.

 I had enough black bias binding left over from another project and had some thread in the right colour. I already had some dowel from when I was planning to make a blind. The only thing I needed to buy was some hooks to attach it to the wall. To finish the shoe tidy off I made a casing for the dowel from the stripy fabric and a lavender heart to make it smell nice, in case we have any smelly shoes!

The pattern for the shoe hanging came from Sew and Stow by Betty Oppenheimer. I found the pattern easy to follow and it worked out as it should have. This book has a lovely selection of useful items, the fabrics they have been made in are so pretty I love looking at the pictures. There are useful tips about how to customise the patterns to make items that exactly fit your needs. The only problem I have with this book is that all the measurements are in inches and I am much happier in metric!

I have also make a lampshade in the same stripy fabric, I bought a cheap lampshade and used double sided tape to stick the fabric on, it is holding up OK so far.