Sole Hope

So Kim and I last year went to a Sole Hope event and this inspired her to want to host one of her own. So for Christmas I made her a banner for it and thought today I'd share it with all of you.

So first off y'all might be wondering what Sole Hope is. It's a none profile that makes shoes out of jeans for children in Uganda to help prevent Jiggers getting into their feet. At the Sole Hope Events they have cutting partied where you take jeans and cut out the shoe patterns from them. Then they get sent off to be made into shoes. So for Kim's future party I made a banner based off the jeans concept. You can use colored jeans to make the shoes just as well as traditional blue jeans. So here is the banner and I'll explain how I went about making it and why I used what I did to make it.

Tada! It's Jean pockets! I simply cut out the back pockets of the jeans. I picked up these colorful ones at goodwill. Made sure they were in nice conditions since I planned to give Kim the rest of the jeans for making shoes. So after cutting them out I had to figure out what order I'd like them in. I just laid them out on the table and played with what colors I liked next to each other. When buying the pants I tried to pick colors that would look nice together. 

After figuring out the order I took white fabric paint and free handed the letters leaving the O in hope blank. Here is a close up look. 

For the O in hope I wanted to match the Sole Hope symbol they use. So I took a screen shot of it on my tablet and then sized it to the size I needed and traced it to paper. I then cut out the tracking and laid it on the pocket and traced it onto the pocket with the white fabric paint. Once I had my out line how I liked it I just brushed the paint into the center of each peice. My white fabric paint was that good Ole puff paint from the 80s our moms used to make sweatshirts with. So I had to brush it smooth or it would have been very puffy. Here is a close up of it. 

Then I took some rope and laid it out and placed the pockets under it to see how long I would need it to be and how I'd like my spacing to be. After I got that all figured out I cut the rope. I then used safety pins to attach the pockets to the rope. You see with each pair of shoes you cut out you pin together the pieces  with a safety pun that then travels with the shoes to Uganda where they will use that safety pin to remove the Jiggers from the child's feet and place the shoes on their clean feet and clean the pin then they use the pin to pin information on the childs shirt on how to prevent Jiggers so when they get home their parents too can be educated on it. 

I hope you all have enjoyed learning a little and seeing a fun craft that has many meanings to it. I'll put a link to Sole Hope here for you to read more if your curious to learn more or about hosting your own party. 

http://www.solehope.org/