Felt boots for Miss Piggy

When I made felt boots while I was writing the book, I used felt that's made of recycled textiles for making several pairs. I still have plenty of that felt left, so I decided to try boots with normal heels. The felt is thick, so larger scales are better, and the doll with the biggest feet is Miss Piggy. So she got a pair of boots as well.

The first thing to do is to make a pattern and cut the pieces. I made the two-piece design as I wanted a curved back seam.

After sewing the vertical seams, it was time for the soles, which are also made of the same felt, and I sewed them in place. The pieces of fur (more about that later) are for the upper edges.

I also made the heels using the same felt. It's so thick that the structure is sturdy enough even without filling the heels (I could have done that using air-drying clay).

I covered the heels with the same plastic decorations I used in Gooliope's shoes. The yarn I used for sewing the seams was silver-colored, so I chose silver-colored decorations.

The final step was gluing the strips of fur in place. I'm not sure if I like these or not, but this was an experiment. I'm starting to think I should have used laces, so I could have made the boots tight fitting instead of this big.

And then about the fur issue. I've had people complaining about the use of leather in the doll shoes I make, so I'm expecting fur to be an even bigger issue. To begin with, these are pieces left over from other people's projects. Since they would have gone to waste otherwise, I see no problem in using them. Basically, the principle of "no waste" trumps the principle of "no fur." 

I had the idea that my view on these things is closest to utilitarianism, but as I did some research, I found out about consequentialism and I think that fits my ethics best. In this case, it means that "what's done is done" (the fur exists due to no action of mine and would have gone to waste) and what matters now are the consequences of further action (i.e. discarding the pieces and being wasteful or putting them into some use, even if that use could be considered frivolous).

Experiment with metal foil

This is going to be a long post. I decided to try something new and wasn't sure how it would turn out. I ended up fixing things a few times when everything didn't go quite as planned.

To start with, I made a pattern for the soles (the doll is the 16" Miss Piggy). Then I cut the soles out of metal sheet (0.3 mm thickness, cut with shears) and bent them to follow the bottoms of the doll's feet.

The other parts of the soles were resin castings I had made earlier. A pair of platforms and heels.

I used hot glue to attach the platform parts to the metal soles. At this point I realized the sides would need something to cover them and make them more even. The resin castings were made using a latex mold, so they had some bumps.

I had this thick and stiff leather that hadn't been useful for anything else, but I thought it would make an even surface for the sides and undersides of the soles. So I cut suitable pieces and glued them on the soles. Again, using hot glue. Actually, everything that required glue in this project was done with hot glue. The new hot glue gun is so handy.

Then I glued the heels in place. These soles were to be covered with metal foil all over, so all pieces needed to be in place before starting that.

The metal foil came from chocolate wrappers. It seems that those all have the inside covered with paper nowadays. Probably some food safety issue. Anyway, the paper had to go before the foil would be usable for two reasons: 1) the foil was too stiff, and 2) the foil had some text embossed into it and that had to go. So, I soaked the foils in water overnight to soften the paper.

When the paper was all soaked and soft, I used my thumbnail to scrape it off. That was slow and tedious work, and the paper started to dry after a while, so I had to put the foil back to water occasionally.

It was impossible to remove all traces of paper, but I got off enough of it for the foil to be usable. I also thought that the glue would probably take better with some traces of paper still left on the foil.

Then I glued the foil on the soles. Unfortunately, even with the leather, the surface was very uneven.

I had been hoping to have the foil to be the finished surface, but it just didn't look that nice. So I decided that I had to do something else with these. But first, I cut insoles out of gold-colored leather and glued them in place. I usually use a neutral light color, but I thought this fit the soles well.

I decided to use this gold-colored decorative plastic band for the straps and cover as much of the sides as possible with it to draw attention away from all the unevenness of the foil surface.

Here are the shoes with the straps glued in place. After this I glued some strings of those decorations to the sides of the heels. I also glued pieces of leather under the heels and platform parts to make the soles even and help keep the shoes upright when they are not on the doll's feet.

Finally, here are some photos of the finished shoes on Miss Piggy.

Another wall-hanging display case

Here is another display case hanging on the wall. The shoes in it are for Monster High Nefera, Tonner's Jessica Rabbit, Tonner's 16" Miss Piggy, Madame Alexander's Cissy, and Tonner's American Model. The link info below the picture will state which dolls the shoes are for.

Row 1 - Nefera; Jessica Rabbit: second pair, third pair, fourth pair

Row 2 - Miss Piggy: first pair, second pair

Row 3 - Miss Piggy: first pair, second pair

Row 4 - Miss Piggy: first pair, second pair

Row 5 - Cissy (Finnish blog), American Model

Row 6 - Cissy: first pair (Finnish blog), second pair (Finnish blog)

Some boots

The first picture shows another display box in my bookshelf. The black boots are the first ever pair of doll boots I have made. They are for the same old doll as the flat-soled shoes in the first collection post. The post about these is in the Finnish blog. The other two pairs are for Tonner's American Model doll. The post about the beige boots is here, and the other boots can be found here.

The next display case is hanging on the wall. I have three of these, and this is the one that can accommodate boots. The others are suitable for smaller shoes. The red pair is for a Lipstik doll, and the boots under them are for Tonner's 16" Miss Piggy as are the ones below those. The two pairs on the right are repainted Monster High boots, upper for Clawdeen, lower for Draculaura.

The next picture shows a display case in my bookshelf. I will probably later use it for boots, but at the moment, there are some shoes for Monster High Gooliope (upper row) and Jolina by Zapf Creation (bottom row). The red shoes with stiletto heels are new, and the darker pair is the first one I made for Gooliope. The black pair on the bottom left is the first pair of gladiator sandals I made, and the two others I made while writing the first Doll Shoe Projects book.

More of my collection

The next part of the collection is two display boxes in my bookshelf. These shoes are mostly for Madame Alexander's Cissy and Tonner's 16" Miss Piggy.

We'll start with the display box on the left. The bottom shelf has one pair of shoes for Cissy and two pairs of boots for Monster High dolls. The rest are shoes for Miss Piggy. There's no blog post for one pair, which I think I made when writing the Techniques book.

Top row: left pair, right pair

Second row: left pair

Third row: left pair, right pair

Bottom row: leftmost pair (Finnish blog), middle pair, rightmost pair

The display box on the right only has shoes for Madame Alexander's Cissy. These blog posts are all in the Finnish blog.

Top row: leftmost pair, middle pair, rightmost pair

Second row: leftmost pair

Third row: leftmost pair, middle pair, rightmost pair

Bottom row: middle pair, rightmost pair

Shoes for Miss Piggy

I haven't been posting in this blog for a long time, but I'll try to continue now, like I'm continuing the Crafts blog. I haven't been making many doll shoes while I've been gone, but there are a couple of projects I've done since the last post that was actually about making doll shoes. I'll start with those before starting any new projects.

The first project is from 2017, shoes for the 16" Miss Piggy. These have resin cast soles, leather insoles, fabric uppers and foam clay on top of the fabric. The foam clay was a bit tricky to get to cover the fabric entirely as it didn't stick to the fabric properly.

I did my best, but there was no way to get the edges even. These were planned to be a closed toe design, although they look like sandals in the previous picture. The idea with this was that the toe part is much easier to shape when it's entirely made of the modeling clay. The only part that really needed additional support was the part going over the foot.

I used glitter glue for the edges where the resin sole was showing through a bit.

The result was neater this way, and the glue also makes sure the clay does not come loose on the edges.

Here are the shoes on Miss Piggy's feet.

I have been tempted to try making shoes that are entirely made of modeling clay, but I always have a hard time making two identical pieces of anything without using molds, so that problem needs to be sorted first, if I want to do it.

Slingbacks for Miss Piggy

I have spent almost the entire weekend with projects related to the book. Chapter 10 is basically finished now and chapter 9 is about 2/3 done. One of the projects contributing to these two was making yet another pair of shoes for Miss Piggy. It is so much easier to get good photos when you make things in her scale.

I started by making wedge soles combining wood and card stock. Making the wedges out of card stock in this scale would have required quite a lot of work, so wood was a better choice.

The next picture shows all the parts for the shoes: uppers (fabric treated with sealer), card stock insoles covered with fabric, painted wedge soles, and leather outer soles.

This time I decided to glue the ends of the straps together first and then glue the uppers in place as it is easier to position the uppers this way.

The finished shoes also got decorated with stickers. I applied sealer after attaching the stickers to make sure they will stay in place.

Silver shoes for Miss Piggy

I haven't been making any shoes for months due to too much work, too hot weather in summer and a general lack of energy and motivation. However, I am trying to continue writing the book, so there will probably be some blog postings as well.

The shoes I made this time are made of silver-colored leather. As leather is thick material, making a neat toe part requires some stretching, so I decided to use polymer clay to make fillers for the toe parts to help them keep their shape.

The leather pieces for the toe parts were easy to cut as only one edge need to be finished at the cutting stage. The rest goes under the insole and will be trimmed during the gluing process.

When gluing the uppers in place, the first parts to glue are the tip and the first flaps on the sides. Then cut flaps in the middle of the sides and glue them in place. These will anchor the uppers in place and the rest of the flaps will be easier to cut and glue.

Here all flaps are glued in place. The most important thing is to ensure there is no overlapping as that will show as bumps in the outer soles.

The heels are pieces of round wooden strips covered with the same leather and enough excess left to reach to the edges of the insoles. Usually there is no need to have this much excess, but these heels were a lot narrower than the width of the sole. The only way to find out the right amount is to try the heels in place, cut a little, try again, cut more if necessary, and repeat as many times as needed.

Here the heels are in place. The seam is a bit higher than I would normally place it, but I had to cover some unevenness in the part where the upper was turned under the insole.

I used leftover pieces of the leather to fill the underside of the insole. This ensures that the outer soles will be even. The leather I used for the outer soles was fairly thin, so any depressions would have shown if I hadn't done this.

The finished shoes have a hole in the strap and a small bead in the opposite part to close the strap.

Polymer clay soles with stiletto heels

The latest video shows how to make soles using patterns with polymer clay. It is actually one of the easiest ways of making soles I have figured out so far, if you don't count the trouble of making the card stock supports. Then again, you can reuse those and make more than one pair of soles before using them for shoe soles as well.


Here are the finished shoes, which are also shown at the end of the video.

Heels for Miss Piggy's boots

I finished the boots I was making for Miss Piggy. They were only missing the heels and the video below shows how I made them. It's a long one, because I didn't do the usual cuts for when I made the same steps for the other shoe.

Making a master for a mould

I'm still making resin castings as 500 ml of resin is a lot for casting such small pieces. Finding out that latex moulds can be used with resin was really great, because I can make moulds for casting just one pair. You can't really use a special design, like the one for Monster High Nefera in the picture below, for a lot of shoes.

As you can see, the parts used for the master are really simple, just wooden and plastic beads, a round wooden stick (for keeping the heel parts together) and card stock. The main things are that the master lasts long enough to make the mould and that there are no openings between the parts for latex to get into (two coats of sealer will take care of that).

In the next picture, the master is attached to a base with clear mounting tape and two coats of sealer have been applied. This is for making the latex mould, which has been described in previous posts.

Here you can see the finished mould and the pair of castings. The part of the mould between the heel and sole needed to be cut a bit to remove the castings and turn the mould. Those parts of the sole were so close to each other that too much latex collected there when making the mould.

I also made a couple of pairs of soles for Miss Piggy. The masters for both designs were made of card stock (sole) and wood (heel). The Barbie wedge sole is included to show the scale.

With such a long and thin sole, it was necessary to have some extra support during the casting process. I removed the heel from the master and used the curved sole under the latex mould to ensure that the mould would keep the correct shape.

More plastic

I decided to try the transparent plastic in Piggy's shoes. As usual, first I needed the insoles.

I glued fabric on them.

And turned the edges under the soles.

I'm usually not particular about the placement of patterns in insoles, but this time I made sure the they would be identical.

Then I cut wide straps from plastic, added strips of stickers, and applied glossy sealer to stop the stickers from falling off.

I made holes at the end of the straps as before and used double-sided tape to keep the straps in place before gluing.

I used one pair of the polymer clay heels just made. I applied one coat of glossy sealer, let it dry, added stickers, and then applied more sealer. The purpose of the first coat of sealer was to make the surface less porous and help the stickers stay in place.

I actually applied the last coat of sealer after assembling the shoes and hung the shoes to dry. The result is always neater, if you can apply the sealer to all necessary surfaces (sides, back, front, bottom) at once, but that means you need to figure out a way to place the heels/shoes to dry in a way that the wet surfaces won't touch anything.

Here are the shoes on 16" Miss Piggy.

For the previous post on using transparent plastic, see here.