Unfinished projects

I've been doing some cleaning and there are a lot of unfinished projects, some of which may never be finished. I decided to collect some of them to this post.

First, a pair of Barbie stilettos, which were bright pink to start with. I painted them black using acrylic paint and then added sealer to prevent the paint from chipping. These are unfinished, because I haven't figured out what kind of straps to use and how to attach them.

Next, a pair of plaster castings for Monster High dolls. The first stage was making a master using balsa wood.

Here's the sanded and painted master with another one made of modeling clay.

Making the latex mould. If you want something else than a wedge sole with this technique, the easiest option is to make the back of the heel straight, so the opening can be placed there.

A pair of plaster soles right out of the mould.

Here after a few coats of paint. And that's how far this project has come.

Then another Monster High repaint. The next stage will be painting the round studs, but I've been postponing that, because I know how hard it will be with eyesight like mine.

The final one is an experiment with shrinking plastic. It's a thin sheet of plastic (white, opaque or transparent), which shrinks and hardens when you bake it in the oven. The first picture shows the piece I made to get the right measurements. The scale drawn in the piece of plastic was originally 3 cm long.

When you bake the pieces, they first curl and then straighten back. The result is flat, if the oven temperature is just right.

I used the plastic sheets to make the same kind of heels as in the shoes made entirely of cardboard. Far right is the pattern in the correct size, far left the pattern enlarged to take the shrinking into consideration, and in the middle is the baked plastic heel.

Here you can see the difference in thickness. The upper piece I'm holding is an unbaked sheet and the lower one is a baked piece.

I have also made the straight parts of soles for these and glued the heels into them, but that's where this project has stopped, at least for now. The next stage would be to make the inner soles, probably out of cardboard as usual.

Shoes for a Living Dead Doll

The Living Dead Dolls have flat feet, so quite a lot of faking is necessary to make something with even a small heel. Here are soles consisting of two layers of cardboard, leather insole, toe part made of air-drying clay (with a little piece of leather preventing the foot from touching the colored clay), and a thick layer of cork.

The toe part of the upper is the first to be glued in place. The clay part helps stretching the leather tightly to prevent creases.

Here you can see the idea. The thick part made of cork makes it possible to make heels for the shoes, and this sort of faking also helps in making shoes that are more in scale with the doll (the doll's feet are much too short compared to the doll's height).

The rest of the upper goes in place next.

This part isn't necessary as you could just glue the outer soles in place and make stacked heels, but I wanted to try something different. So, I took pieces of the leather I used for the uppers, cut outer soles that were slightly larger than what I would have used normally, and glued them in place.

Then I sewed stitches all around, giving the impression that the soles were stitched in place.

Here's a closer look of the stitches.

After stitching, I trimmed the edges, glued the outer soles in place, trimmed those as well, and made stacked heels using the same leather as for the outer soles. Finally, I made the holes for laces and made laces using the same thread I used for stitching.

The shoes go on and off without opening the laces, so I put a little glue to the knots to prevent them from opening.

Boots with lining

The fabric I wanted to use for boots turned out to stain. Fortunately, I was using an extra pair of legs from a Create a Monster set, so it didn't ruin a doll. As I was set on using that fabric, I decided to try making lining for the boots. I wanted it to be as thin as possible, but still stretchy, so I used a piece of the stretchy lace fabric I used alone for an earlier pair of boots.
 

First I sewed the top seam, joining the outer fabric and lining.
 

Then I folded the pieces lengthwise and sewed the back seams.
 

After that, I turned the outer parts the right side out.
 

The top needs to be adjusted so that the lining does not show, but remains the fabric that will be against the doll's leg.
 

Then I glued the uppers to the insoles made of leather and cardboard as usual.

I made the heels from pieces of wood, which I covered using the same fabric.
 

Here are the finished boots on a doll. She's sitting, because unfortunately, the heels turned out to be slightly wrong length and the doll cannot stand when wearing the boots. As you can see, the top of the back seam has a fairly big bulge, because the fabric is folded both vertically and horizontally there. As this was the first pair I made using this technique, I didn't try to do anything about that, but it needs to be addressed, if I decide to try making another pair.

Black and white Monster High boots

I've been perfecting my boot making techniques. These are based on the boots described in an earlier blog post, so I will only explain the improvements I made.

The first boots are made of thin, stretchy lace, so I used slightly thicker fabric treated with sealer to form the heel and toe parts.

Here are the lace parts with the back seams sewn. Note that I folded the top of the fabric to make the edge neater. The fold looks OK with fabric this thin. I glued the back seam to the fabric at the heel to make sure it keeps in the correct place.

Here all the gluing is done. I left the toe parts last and glued the lace into the thicker fabric as the boots look better that way. PVA glue is transparent when it dries, so you can't see it. The outer soles at the bottom of the picture are made of leather.

The heels are made of wood, and I painted the heels and soles with off-white acrylic paint. I was only going to paint the heels, but the sides of the outer soles looked too dark compared to the fabric, so I ended up painting everything.

The other pair is made of using the same fabric as in the earlier blog post. I only used sealer treated fabric for the toe parts in these. Thicker fabric like this does not require additional support, if you're making the toe part round. However, a pointed one, like in these, requires additional support to keep its shape. I also made these thigh-high instead of just knee-high.

The boots with soles glued in place. I glued the upper fabric to the support fabric also in these. That required being careful with the glue, so it wouldn't seep through as that would have been clearly visible on matte fabric.

The outer soles are again made of leather and the heels are made of round pieces of wood (if you're lucky, you can find stuff in crafts shops that only require cutting into length and painting, like in this case).

Front view of the boots.

Cork soles for Nefera

I decided to finally use the card-woven band I made for Nefera's shoes, shown in this first photo:

For the soles, I wanted to use something that requires similar amount of effort, and also something that made it possible to glue the straps to the sides of the soles, so I made the soles out of cork. You can find details about how to do that in an earlier blog post.

I treated the band with sealer, so it could be cut at any place without the ends fraying. However, that made the band very stiff, so gluing the straps required applying more pressure than usual.

Here are the shoes with the strap that goes behind the ankle not yet glued to the sole.

 All straps glued in place and buttons attached for closing the ankle strap.

Unfortunately, closing the ankle straps left a gap. If I had used rubber bands for the loops, this could have been prevented, but rubber deteriorates, so I used cotton yarn. I had to shorten the ankle straps a bit, because they were so stiff that I had to avoid any overlapping. I'm considering moving the buttons back a bit to close that gap, but for now, the shoes are finished.

Another view of the finished shoes.

Bratzillaz vs. Monster High feet

Bratzillaz dolls have actual feet, unlike Bratz dolls, and of course those feet are different size from any other doll. Monster High dolls come closest, but the arch in their feet is longer. Bratzillaz foot is also wider.

The photo shows from left to right: Bratzillaz, regular Monster High, Nefera.

New patterns

Patterns for Monster High shoes and soles described in recent blog posts are now available on my web site.