What I've been up to

Resting after Wardrobe in a Week.

Mopping up a few last things from that week.

Being sick.

And finishing these:

Which are a kind of slipper or light shoe (flat heel and very thin sole), based mostly on the method of Mary Wales Loomis.

I don't have her book, although I'm sure it is marvelous and well worth the money, if you want to make your own shoes.  I have gone off the information she has helpfully provided on her site, paying back with prayers for her well-being.

Her method is to make a pair of plaster casts using shoes you already have, then build up the inner parts of the shoes with stiffened buckram and structural pieces scavenged from old shoes, then sew up the uppers (around the top edge), stretch them around the forms, hand sew back and forth across the bottoms to hold them in place, then glue on the soles and heels, and put in the insoles.

Here are my forms (plaster plus some papier mache filling out gaps; I didn't have quite enough plaster, and not enough got down into the toes), with my stiffened buckram drying around it:

I was in a no-buy mood at that stage, so I used burlap scraps for buckram at the sides, heel stiffening from an old pair of shoes that I pulled apart (very educational, deconstructing a higher-quality shoe; highly recommended), and for the toes I handwove crochet cotton--something that is worthy of a post of its own.

After this step, I set all this aside to work on WiaW, and to be sick with a nasty summer cold.  During that time, we had very humid weather, and my plaster/papier mache forms started growing mold inside their loose plastic bags.

When I got back to them, I found the mold, taped the bags completely closed, and tried to get the shoes finished off quickly, so I could throw the forms away.

The hardest part in making shoes is actually fiddling around and thinking about the next step.

Cutting leather is not that hard; I use kitchen shears, and occasionally a steak knife.

It is indeed a wonderful thing to have accurate models, to build up your shoes around.  Note that these shouldn't be shaped exactly like your feet, but instead like the space that your feet will need inside the shoe. So the better fitting the shoes that you make your forms from, the better the final result will fit.  That was what held me back when I was trying to start making shoes, several years ago:  I didn't own any shoes that fit me well enough to be worth duplicating.

There were several points in the shoemaking process where actually buying the book would have been helpful.  This was certainly a very challenging project for me, and I was tempted at times to give up.

One point where I had a lot of problems was how to keep the edge of the upper from sliding around or stretching out of shape while stitching across the bottom.  I did run a few long stitches across the hole to help hold the shape, but it wasn't enough to keep the entire top edge from ending up about 3/8 to 1/2 inch lower than I had intended--which is a lot, for a shoe.

Another is that the cotton upholstery velvet that I was using is thick, and was hard to gather up underneath the foot neatly.  I decided that the underside was too bumpy to glue to directly, so I elected to do a two-needle saddle stitch around the edges of the sole, making holes with an awl (which could be improvised from a nail and a small chunk of wood, if necessary, but I happen to have one).

(Sometimes people cut a little groove in the leather for the stitches to sit down in, but in this case the leather was too thin.)

Still, the slippers are wearable for the intended purpose, and I learned a lot that may be helpful in the future.

Costs:  $13 (at full retail) for vegetable-tanned leather for the sole, cotton velvet was handed down to me (and dyed with some leftover dye during WiaW), inner lining is from an old skirt, sole was stitched with about $3 of waxed braided cord left over from an earlier project, inner sole is about $1 worth of scrap leather from surplus store, buckram was handmade from hand-me-down materials and scraps, fabric stiffener fluid was handed down to me, a pair of teardown shoes for potential parts (only heel stiffening used) and assembly hints was $7 at Goodwill, and the thread was a Christmas gift.

Barge Cement (available at Hobby Lobby) was $8, but I ended up not using any for this project.

The shoes I disassembled did give me one valuable hint about how to make the shoe bend in the right place:  put a pattern of little slits into the inner sole at that point, enough to make it more flexible there, while not reducing the strength of the leather by too much.  In these shoes, the inner sole was not even leather, but a high-quality paperboard--no wonder modern shoes start falling apart when they get wet!