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.