Shoelace Tips For Everyone - Fieggen

Preventing Shoe Tongues Slipping Sideways

Many shoes have tongues that tend to slip towards the outside of the foot. This is particularly common on shoes with flatter tongues that don't fit the curvatures of the top part of the foot.

To minimize this slippage, the top of most shoe tongues includes some form of “centering loop”:

• A separate loop of leather or material;
• A label that's stitched at the top and bottom and open at both sides;
• A pair of vertical grooves cut through the upper layer of material or right through the tongue.

There are several ways of lacing through such tongue centering loops to minimize sideways movement:

• Avoid straight lacing methods like Straight Bar Lacing because they don't hold horizontally.
• If using Over Under Lacing, note that the “Over” sections are more effective than the “Under” sections because the centering loop will be jammed between the sides of the shoe, limiting the sideways movement.
• Use a lacing method that runs the laces through the loop at a steeper angle, such as Lattice Lacing or Zipper Lacing.
• Rather than lacing the whole shoe differently, use Zipper Lacing only on those eyelets immediately above and below the tongue loop.
• If you really want control via a lacing method, try using Loop Back Lacing just at the tongue centering loop. The tongue generally slips outwards (towards the “little toe” side), so run the lace end that is on the “big toe” side of the shoe through the tongue centering loop and back again while the other side only loops through the shoelace and back again. Don't run both ends through the tongue centering loop, otherwise the loop would be scrunched up.
• Finally, another possibility is to forget the lacing and to physically restrict how easily the shoelaces slide through the tongue centering loop. For example, stitch the loop partially closed to form a tighter passage through. Or swap thin “sports” laces for “fat” laces (which has the added advantage of looking cool!)

In addition, tongue centering loops destroy the aesthetics of most lacing methods. It's inevitable that part of the lacing will end up hidden as it passes through the centering loop. There are a couple of measures to minimize the effects:

• Run just one of the segments through the loop, then run the other segment across the top. That way only one diagonal of the “X” would be hidden by the loop – and even then, only that part that wasn't already hidden by the outer segment.
• This can be taken one step further by initially running the first segment across the top of the centering loop, then back through the loop, then back across the top again – effectively forming a complete loop through the centering loop. However, this would scrunch the loop somewhat.