Shoe Mania, Part 3: Sandal Pieces, Unite!

Now that I had dyed and put together the uppers for my sandals, I wanted to add some padding between the soles before I put the soles together. I got some foam rubber meant for insoles that had a tan knit fabric covering on one side (Ortho Sponge Top-Cover ordered from Louis Birns & Sons). I'll get it without the fabric for next time, but this will be fine for now.

I cut out 3/4-length pieces for each foot, plus extra pieces for a second layer at the heel.


First, I glued the heel layer to the sole layer of padding. I also marked where the sandal straps will go relative to the padding.


Since the straps are all supposed to be adjustable, they need to be able to slide across the sole, so I was careful to avoid putting any contact cement where the straps will be. I'm now ready to glue the padding to the upper sole. Note that the extra layer of padding at the heel will butt right up against the strap there.



The fabric side of the foam rubber did not glue well, so it required multiple coats of the contact cement before gluing to the other piece.

Also, once I had it glued together, there wasn't enough leather to form a good bond around the padding. I pulled it back apart, trimmed the padding to be narrower, and glued it back together.


Nailing the Soles

Since I had this romantic vision of shoemakers nailing shoes together, I wanted to try that myself. Finding the right type of nails turned out to be problematic, though, since normal people don't use shoemaker's nails. There are also quite a few different types of shoemaker's nails. The instructions I was following in the "Sandal Making" book just said "Sole Nails", which turns out to be not quite the right terminology.

I ended up getting "wire clinch nails" from Louis Birns. And of course, I needed to learn yet another measurement convention. It seems that for wire clinch nails, the sizes are noted as 4/8, 5/8, 6/8, 7/8, and 8/8, where 8/8 is a nail an inch long, and 4/8 is half an inch. The trick, though, is that the tip of the nail is meant to bend over when it strikes the anvil, thus locking the nail into the leather sole. So an 8/8 nail is meant to secure a sole that is just less than an inch thick.

I used 5/8 for the main sole and 7/8 for the heel. Here you can see that the nails on the sole poke through quite a bit and bend way over--they are too long for this thickness of sole. These nails would really mess up a nice hardwood floor.

If you look closely you can see the U shape of the nails poking out from the soles--not the desired effect.

Non-slip Soling

I got a sheet of SoleTech 3.5 soling material from Louis Birns. This is pretty thin rubbery material with a slight texture to make the soles less slippery.

Here are the SoleTech pieces I cut. I don't plan to have the rubber come up over the point of the shoes, so it is cut short at the toes.


I glued on the SoleTech with more contact cement. I also dyed the edges of the sandals blue and treated them with Lexol and carnauba creme as I did with the upper soles and straps.

Here are the finished sandals. Yay! I've finished my first pair!


Thoughts for Next Time

Nails: The 7/8 wire clinch nails I used around the heels worked fine, but the 5/8 nails I used for the much thinner sole section were too long. This caused them to form raised "U" shapes on the surface of the sole when they bent over, instead of having just the tip bending flat back into the sole.

Bottom sole surfacing: I had some trouble with having the SoleTech sheet peeling off the sandals, particularly where the nails stuck up from the leather sole, causing about a square centimeter of the SoleTech to not adhere well to the leather sole with the contact cement. I had to redo the sole piece for one sandal, partly because I had cut it a little small, and a couple of nails stuck out right at the edge, aggravating the peeling problem. The second time I cut the SoleTech piece a little larger than the sole, and I trimmed off the excess with a knife after gluing. That worked much better. I think trimming the rubber to the sole also helps avoid creating a place where the rubber can catch on something and be pulled off. Later, though, I plan to try some different soling materials. This SoleTech 3.5 is really too thin and fragile for the sandals I'm making, and it's wearing through much too quickly.

Cement: It also seemed that the contact cement wasn't strong enough (except for its smell!) for gluing the rubber to the leather, though it was fine for the leather-to-leather bond. One of the guys at the leather store suggested using multiple coats of the cement on each side before putting them together. I tried multiple coats later, and it helped (though at that later point I was also using the new Barge formula of Tandy's contact cement, which may have worked better, though it smelled even worse than the previous cement).

The Lure of Leather

This is the piece of thick "saddle skirting" leather I used for my soles. It was an entire side before I started cutting it, and it takes up most of my kitchen floor.


Once in a while I get way too much help! Both my younger daughter and Lacey think this is just the place to plop down for a bit...


And, of course, they want some sandals too!

Shoe Mania, Part 2: Strappy Uppers

In my previous sandal-making post, I cut and formed the soles and heels of my new sandals. During the time I was waiting for those to dry, I started working on the uppers of the sandals. I started by preparing the straps.

The buckles I was using required a size #6 hole for the buckle tongues. I thought I'd try to save some time later by preparing the strap ends with holes and points ahead of time, as shown in the picture. It turned out that it made the fitting a little bit harder, so I won't do it that way again. It's easier to make the holes and such later than it is to correctly position the buckle later.

I used a half-inch oblong punch (also known as a bag punch or oval punch) to make the holes for my straps. I had put my foot on the upper sole to mark the hole locations. I find the punches to be kind of slippery and hard to hold, so I put the rubber bands on to improve the grip. It didn't help much, unfortunately.

Here I tried putting the straps in place, and the whole thing is held together with more rubber bands (if I had to be stranded on a desert island, I'd want a big bag of rubber bands with me).

Here is how the straps look from under the upper sole. You can imagine that these fairly thick straps might be a bit uncomfortable to walk on, since you would feel them as lumps through the upper sole.

One way to deal with the lumpy strap problem is suggested in the Sandal Making book: use a scarier-looking version of a man's razor, called a skiver (in this case a "Super Skiver"), to carefully scrape off enough thickness from the upper sole so that the straps nestle into the sole. Depending on the thicknesses of the straps and the sole, this approach varies in its success.

One thing I found is that the skiver takes a lot of practice to use, and it's a bit like using a potato peeler. The amount of material you take off in one swipe depends on the angle of the handle relative to the leather surface. It's really easy to dig right into your leather and cut off more than you intended. On the other hand, if you stay timid, you'll take a lot of time and not get deep enough. Practice, practice, practice.

Another approach, which I didn't do on this pair of sandals (guess what's coming in a future blog), is to skive the upper sole, the lower sole, and the straps. That doesn't work for all cases, though, such as where the straps are adjustable and you may later expose a part of the strap that was initially covered.

Dyeing

The next step is to dye the various pieces before assembly. Similar to how I finished my third belt, I dyed them all with Tandy's Leather Dye, cleaned them with Lexol, and finished them with a layer of Tandy's Carnauba Creme. I dyed the entire length of each strap (both sides) since the adjustable straps will be able to slide through the shoe--I don't know for certain what parts will show, and it may change over time.


Here is how buffing affects the look of the Carnauba Creme. The lower piece in the picture has been buffed with a cloth and is nice and shiny. There are some white flecks of wax on the upper piece.


I couldn't resist putting the shoes back together with the rubber bands to see how they looked at this point:


Hardware

Adding the hardware, the buckles and rivets, was one of the more satisfying stages for me. This is when things started to look really cool and shiny.

Since I hadn't done buckles before, I had to play with getting the size and location of the slot correct on the strap. I tried my half-inch and three-quarter-inch punches, as well as punching two small holes and using a knife to cut out the leather between them (second hole from the right).


The three-quarter-inch punch worked the best for my half-inch sandal buckles.


Here you can see the slot for the buckle and the corresponding holes for the rivet that holds the buckle onto the strap:


Here are the uppers with buckles and rivets, all ready for the final assembly to the lower soles.


To be continued....

Shoe Mania, Part 1: Desire, Design, and De Soles

I've long been longing to make my own shoes, particularly sandals. It seems like it should be pretty straightforward: find something to use as a sole, and strap it to your feet somehow. Simple, right?

Right. As my older daughter is fond of reminding me, I never like to do things the easy way. And I never start with the easiest version. Nah, that would be too easy!

Now that I've gotten into leather working, it seems to me that the next thing after belts should be shoes. After all, since I'm not a gunslinger, how many tooled holsters do I need?

Addiction

I'm not a total shoe addict like Imelda Marcos or some of the celebrities and fans of shows like "Sex and the City", but I've owned a few pairs of shoes over the years. The highest count I remember getting to was 83 pairs before I started getting rid of them in earnest (though I haven't counted lately--the count may have crept up again).

I don't tend to go for the really expensive shoes like they show on TV. Fortunately I have pretty "normal" size 7-ish medium-width feet, so I don't have a hard time finding shoes that fit. My most expensive shoes ever are some Dansko clogs ($125) that I wear all the time in the northern California winter, and my current favorite shoes are some faux-fur-lined "tie-dyed" plastic clogs I got for seven bucks on close-out at Walmart.


Style

One big lure for me on making my own shoes is style. I can make them the way I want them, and it doesn't have to follow any particular fashion or fad of the moment. Getting my own style turns out to be harder than just the design and the desire, but that's the general idea.

I've always really liked shoes with strongly upturned toes, or what I think of as "elf" or "Turkish" style toes, just because I think they're cute and different. Of course, those are pretty hard to find at Walmart or any of the usual shoe emporia in my area. However, I did once find some sandals in Singapore with upturned toes, and I love them.

The interesting thing about these sandals is that the upturned toe actually helps me walk. As I move forward, my toes push down on the upturned sole, which then pushes the heel section up like a see-saw, so the heel section actually follows my own heel as it moves upward. So walking in these sandals is more natural-feeling and easy than the scuffing I find I have to do with other mule-type sandals.

I also like the adjustability and security of straps with buckles. Here is my rough sketch of my starting sandal design (which changed a bit before I finished the sandals, of course):


Getting Off Track Right from the Start

Since this was my first pair of sandals, I did a lot of experimentation along the way. I was following Tandy's "Sandal Making" eBook, but while very useful, it was fairly brief and couldn't answer questions I ran into. Also, of course I was doing my own sandal style, rather than one from the book, so I couldn't just follow a recipe. And to make things stray further from the book, I was using different types of leather, dyes, and finishing products. I also wanted to put padding in the sole, since I already know my heels get sore quickly without a lot of padding (I'm used to running shoes and similar cushioned shoes). Oh, and did I mention the upturned toes?

Making the Pattern

I started by making a pattern of my feet. I put ground-up chalk on my feet to get footprints as well as having my daughter draw around my feet (pencil vertical, please) on cardboard. I cut this pattern out, adding an extra quarter inch on each edge as the "seam allowance".


I then traced around that on another piece of cardboard, and added the extra allowance for the pointed toe to the second version. This way I can keep the original pattern for later and make modifications as needed on the pointed version.


Cutting Out the Pieces

Cutting out the pieces for the soles and the heels proved more difficult than I had expected. For the bottom (outer) sole and the heel layers, I was using saddle skirting leather, which is quite heavy and stiff (but not as stiff as an "armor and shield leather bend", which I knew I wouldn't be able to cut without a band saw). I was also cutting from a very large piece, an "extra large side" (that would be "half a cow" in normal English).


This stuff is 13 to 15 oz. in weight. From Tandy's list of leather-related terms: "Leather is usually measured in terms of ounces. One ounce equals 1/64th of an inch thickness."So a weight of 13 to 15 oz. means the leather is 13/64th to 15/64th of an inch thickness. Not quite a quarter of an inch thick. It felt like I was trying to cut out pieces of my favorite clipboard with a utility knife! I found out later that it's a lot easier to cut the leather if it's wet, but that has its own issues, such as waiting for it to dry.


I cut two pieces for each heel so I could stack them.

I used three different thicknesses of leather for my sandals: 13-15 oz. for the soles and heels, 6-7 oz. for the inner sole, and 4-5 oz. for the straps. I tried using the tin snips pictured here, but they didn't work all that well--probably not sharp enough. I found a utility knife worked the best for me. I used a strap cutter for the straps.


Here are my cut pieces:


Gluing on the Heels

I used contact cement to glue the heel pieces together and then onto the bottom soles.


Turning the Toes

Leather can be formed pretty easily by soaking it in water and letting it dry in the desired shape. In the following picture I had just poured out the soaking water from the bin. The leather was pretty floppy at that point.

Since it couldn't hold a shape on its own, I let the leather dry most of the way. Then I pressed it against my feet and shaped it the way I wanted, using rubber bands to hold the pieces together. The heels had come off when I tried to shape the soles, since the water had not completely soaked into the glued layers, so they were stiffer than the main sole.

You might notice that the heel pieces are now smaller and a different shape than they were when I cut them out. The "Sandal Making" book had suggested this slanted design, and when I had tried standing on the heels and soles for shaping, I found that the original heels were too big to be comfortable, so I cut off chunks of the heels.

The rectangle shape in the sole on the right in the following picture is from a piece of the excess heel that I had put there to create arch support while the soles were drying. It made quite an impression, as did the rubber bands holding the heels in their new place and shape. Fortunately those don't affect the final appearance of the sandals.

It took a couple of days to dry the soles completely, after which they were quite hard. I did the same soaking and shaping for the upper soles, though the result was much more flexible.



This forming process is quite fun, though it takes a long time and for most sandals it's really not necessary (those pointy toes require it here).

I'm now ready to build the upper parts of the sandals, which I'll cover in my next article.

Dog Mania

Yup, I got out my white sheet for a photo shoot again, and there was Lacey, offering her services as a model.


"Really, these would look good on me."


"Well, I'm not sure those pointy shoes are quite my style..."