Monday, September 6, 2010

Orange silk platforms for Jessica Rabbit

These shoes look simple, but surprisingly, this is the most time-consuming pair I have made so far. In all, I estimate that I used 8-9 hours for making these shoes. These are for Tonner's Jessica Rabbit, who has an Athletic Body with high heel feet. This means the feet are almost as big as American Model's.

I started with parts I originally made for American Model, although the original masters were for Madame Alexander's Cissy. The good thing about making the sole using two separate pieces is that you can use the pieces for different dolls as long as their foot size is approximately the same. In this case, the differences are in the shape of the arch and the length of the foot, both of which can be accommodated when making the cardboard parts of the sole.

The picture shows the resin parts of the soles and the patterns for making the cardboard parts. The pattern on the right is an extra one as it turned out I didn't need it. 


These are the platform parts with the cardboard parts for the outer sole in place. I made the upper cardboard part first with two layers of cardboard, glued it to the resin part and then glued the lower parts (two layers) in place one layer at a time.

Here are the plaster castings of the doll's feet, cardboard insoles (with two layers of cardboard in each), outer soles, and heels.

Next, I covered the insoles with white satin. As glue would seep through the fabric and make it lose its shine, the fabric edges needed to be glued under the insoles where they wouldn't be visible. Usually I just treat the fabric with sealer and cut the excess along the edges of the insole.

The fabric I planned to use for covering the outer soles was silk, which has the same problem as satin. So I had to be careful not to get any glue on the fabric in places where it would be visible. Only the flaps, which were glued over and under the sole could have any glue in them.

Here are both insoles and outer soles with fabric glued in place.

Next, I made the uppers. Silk is too thin as such, so I cut the uppers from thicker fabric and covered them with silk. No part of the thicker fabric was to go under the insole, just the silk covering, so the uppers needed to be exactly the right size.

I don't usually use lining, but the flaps would have been visible without it, so I cut slightly smaller pieces than the uppers from the same white satin I used for the insoles. I glued the lining in place with Fray Stop, which doesn't get hard when it dries like PVA glue does.

Then I glued the uppers into the insoles, which were now finished.

Covering the heels with silk all the way would have been too difficult, so I painted part of them with silver color. Some stiletto platforms have this construction in real life.

In the upper part of the heels I used silk I had treated with sealer. It looks different from the fabric in the rest of the shoe, but there was no choice, if I wanted a neat result.

Here the heel is glued in place.

Then I glued the fabric to the outer sole the same way as before, using triangular flaps.

All that was left was gluing the two finished pieces together and covering the underside of the outer soles. For the arch, I used silk treated with sealer, like in the heels, and the platform part is covered with a little piece of leather.

Here are the finished shoes on the doll's feet.


3 comments:

DLSarmywife said...

OMG these are amazing! I am truly awe-struck by your shoe making talent! =D

FunFashionInSeason said...

Can the booties be resized to fit a monster high girl?

Tarja said...

Which booties do you mean? In case you used a wrong word and actually meant the shoes in this post, I'd say it is possible, but doing all these steps in Monster High scale could be very frustrating.