Mostly sew with socks on my feet. However when I am cutting out fabric with the rotary cutter, I try to have shoes on to protect my feet should I drop one of those cutters which stay open until manually closed. ALSO I took a free motion embroidery class and the teacher insited that we use our LEFT FOOT on the foot feed. Being right handed that was a little different. There happened to be a lady in class who was having a lot of trouble with her right knee and had never thought about using left foot on foot pedal, and this really did help her that particular day.