A simple shoe fix

As I've mentioned a few times before, I just have the dickens of a time shopping for new shoes. Not only do I have rather oddly-shaped feet, I'm also an ethical vegetarian (well, near-vegetarian, anyway) who won't wear leather. So finding shoes that fit both my feet and my values, provide reasonable value for the money, and look acceptable (not fantastic, just acceptable) is a major struggle every time. Walking into a shoe store, looking at every single pair on the shelves, finding maybe half a dozen worth trying on, and walking out with nothing isn't just a common experience for me — it's par for the course.

As a result, whenever I do manage to find a pair of shoes I'm reasonably happy with, I become deeply attached to it and will go to great lengths to keep it working. So when I discovered that I'd lost one of the decorative snaps off my spring-and-fall walking shoes, discarding the shoes clearly wasn't an option. In theory, I could have just kept on wearing them, since the shoes are a slip-on style that doesn't actually need the snap to function, but its absence made the shoe look untidy. So instead, I set out to find something to repair it with.

First of all, naturally, I hunted around the bedroom, looking under dressers and into corners to see if the missing snap cap would turn up (the post was still in place). When that yielded nothing, my next thought was to find a set of snaps similar to the original ones and just replace the missing cap. There isn't a fabric store near here, so I tried Michael's, where I knew they carried a few assorted sewing notions. No luck. They had some snaps, but nothing close to an appropriate size.

Fortunately, I'd figured this might happen, so I'd already come up with a a backup plan: just buy some beads of an appropriate size and replace both snaps with those. And for this, Michael's was able to offer me quite a large selection. After several minutes perusing the bead aisle and comparing options, I settled on a $3 strand of grey beads with an agate-like appearance. There were over a dozen of them, so even if my first attempt didn't work out, I'd have plenty of chances to try again.

The first step was to get the snap off the intact shoe. This proved much tougher than I expected — so tough that it made me wonder how I'd ever managed to lose the other snap in the first place. Eventually, with the aid of a knife and a bit of leverage, I managed to work the cap loose, slightly bending the post it attached to in the process. So whatever happened, I was committed now.

For my first attempt to attach the beads, I used a hot glue gun. Neither Brian nor I can remember where we first picked this thing up, but as I recall, it cost us only $5, including the glue sticks, and the repairs it's made possible have paid for it many times over. But alas, this was not one of them. It was relatively simple to apply a bead of hot glue to the stub where each snap had been and press one of my new beads into it, though I did have a little trouble with tendrils of hot glue stretching out from the bead like hot cheese on pizza. But once I'd cleaned those up and let the glue dry, it proved not to be very secure. As soon as I picked up one of the shoes and just experimentally flexed it, off popped the bead.

So, once again, I moved on to Plan B: sewing the beads in place. This went fairly easily for the first shoe, the one that started out with an intact snap: I just removed the back half of the snap, then stitched up through the back of the flap of material where it had been, through the bead, and back down through the flap. After a few iterations of this, I had a bead in place that neatly covered the hole, and I was thinking, "Hey, this will be a pretty easy repair after all!"

Needless to say, I spoke too soon. When I removed the back half of the snap on the other shoe, the fabric behind it separated into two pieces. At first I thought I could just stitch through both pieces before going through the bead, but it quickly discovered I would have needed at least three hands for this: one to hold each flap in place and a third to do the sewing. So instead, I used one hand to rather awkwardly hold both flaps while I stitched them more or less back together. Then, once I had only a single piece of fabric to work with, I was able to sew the bead on more or less as I had with the first shoe. 

I can't be sure how well this makeshift repair will hold up, since I've only worn the shoes a couple of times since performing it. But at least the two shoes match now, and at a glance, you wouldn't realize they hadn't originally been designed this way. In fact, if anything, the little beads are snazzier-looking than the original snaps. And best of all, I should now be able to keep wearing these shoes for at least one more year, spring and fall, before I have to embark on a long, grueling search for a suitable replacement.