Shoelaces go through "eyelets," and here's the connection, from an ad in Post Office Edinburgh and Leith Directory, 1846.

From The Demon McGuire, 1885.  Did you know that the idea of a frightening, disembodied giant foot traces back to the very first gothic novel, Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764)?

The text reads, "The secret to getting back on one's feet lies in simple inversion.  Cats famously land on their feet by using a pinhole to project an inverted image."  [For the Wild Swan.]

"The Gymnastic Grammarian": an illustration from an 1884 issue of Puck magazine.  The caption reads: "He ought to be muzzled. —Every time he opens his mouth he puts his foot in it."

"We have found a strange foot-print on the shores of the unknown.  We have devised profound theories, one after another, to account for its origin.  At last, we have succeeded in reconstructing the creature that made the foot-print.  And Lo!  It is our own."
—Arthur Eddington, qtd. in Cosmic Trigger, Vol. 1 by Robert Anton Wilson