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.