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.