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.

Some decorating

I've been mostly writing the book, so no new shoes, but I did decorate the yellow boots from the previous post. I'm really having fun with the hot glue gun, now that I have a proper one. All the decorations are attached with hot glue, except the metal ones on the sides.

The cup cakes have metal spikes for attaching them. That's otherwise fine, but the metal may end up scratching the doll's leg. This is easy to fix by gluing a bit of felt on the inside to cover the metal. Here the boot on the back already has the felt in place. Not that it really matters with the Kindi Kids doll, which isn't a collectible, but for better dolls this is a good idea.

While I was making these, I also took photos for what I thought was the last example for the book, except I came up with another idea. The last chapter will be about making boots for dolls with molded shoes. My main example there is the 12" Miss Piggy by Tonner Doll Company. Her original shoes are fine, but it's interesting to experiment on ways to cover them and make fake heels.

Variation of the stiletto heels

These shoes are made with similar resin soles as the red stiletto heels. The previous post shows the painting stage. I wanted different heels for these, but ended up using the same structure underneath. I don't remember what kind of glue I used for the red pair, but this time I used hot glue to secure the wooden sticks in place.

I painted the heels black, and while the paint was drying, I thought about different ways of using the plastic material also in the heels in addition to using it for the straps. I ended up with the structure below in which the bottom pieces are first glued in place around the heel and then the upper part.

Here are the finished shoes. The plastic parts of the heel are glued in place using hot glue, while the straps over the toe part are sewn in the similar way as in the red shoes. 

Painting resin soles

I have two more pairs of the soles I used for the stiletto heels. I like resin soles, because you can do so much more with them than with plaster castings, but the thing I'm not that fond of is the painting required. It took over a week to get these painted because enamel paints have such a long drying time.

Now I'm trying to decide the type of heels and the uppers for the yellow shoes. The black ones will have the uppers made of the black and silver material in the picture below. It's similar to the all silver material I used for the red shoes. I also found some fairly similar material last weekend (the red and gold ones in the photo), except a lot cheaper, 4 cm wide and 2 meters in a roll and only cost 1€ per roll. Of course I had to get some, although not for these shoes. I think the yellow ones will have something different for uppers.

The next problem is figuring out the heels. I have plenty of those round wooden sticks I used for the stiletto heels, but I want something different for these. Maybe using the sticks as a support inside and building something fancy around them. I guess it's time to go browsing my collection of shoe pictures to get ideas.

New use for Christmas decorations

I had covered resin wedge soles with black leather to illustrate the process and then I needed to figure out what to do with them. I decided to try a new strap design. The straps are black cotton treated with sealer. The three straps are glued to a small strip of fabric on the reverse side to keep them together.

I glued leather insoles in place and then glued the straps to the sides of the wedge soles with the ends going under the soles.

The final pieces came from this plastic Christmas decoration. I suppose you could use it in straps as it is, but I am always worried about scratches, so that's why I decided to use fabric straps underneath. Also, the plastic straps stay in their correct places better when they are glued to a stiffer structure.

I have used something similar once before and then I left the ends of the string visible, but this time I decided to glue the ends under the soles. This required removing some plastic beads to get just the thread inside. You can use pliers for that. Put the string between a flat part of the pliers and crush the beads, then remove the plastic pieces, so only the thread remains.

I glued the strings to the straps on the entire length to ensure they won't slip out of place and then glued the ends under the soles.

Then I glued the outer soles in place. The light-colored thread remained visible in some places, so I painted those parts black.

Making boots using the pattern, part 2

Gluing the uppers to the soles took longer than I expected, so the video got really long and I had to divide it into two parts. These videos show the process all the way to the point where only the heels are missing.

Making boots using the pattern, part 1

This is the first part of making boots using the pattern created in the previous video. The video was getting quite long and I didn't have the time to finish the boots, so I thought it was better to upload this in two parts. I will probably shoot the second part next weekend.

Wedges for Sybarite

I realized I haven't used many of the cast resin soles I made for Sybarite a few years ago. I found interesting plastic material I wanted to use, so I decided to use a pair of cast resin wedge soles with that. I started by painting the soles black using enamel paint (solvent-based). The extra sole in front is there to show how the soles look straight out of the mould.

The plastic for the uppers looks like this. It was rectangular originally, but I had already cut the required pieces out at this point. These were available in various colors at 2 € per 10 x 12 cm piece. I got this and another piece in silver.

Here are the pieces for the shoes before trimming the edges.

And a closeup showing the structure of the material better.

Plus another closeup showing the back.

The insole is just one layer of card stock and a piece of leather. There was no reason to use more layers of card stock as the arch in the soles is exactly the same as in Sybarite's foot, so the foot provided the desired form during assembly. After trimming the edges of the plastic pieces, I attached them using sewing thread.

Here are the straps with sewing thread attached.

And here they are in place. As you can see, they stay straight at this stage because of the way the sewing threads are attached, but gluing the ends to the sides of the soles will correct that.

The ankle part is closed with a strap made of leather.

I attached a small piece of bent wire at the end of the strap and that goes through a hole on the opposite side as shown in the photo. It is the same method I used for Monster High shoes with cork soles and it works surprisingly well despite being so simple. You just need to apply a lot of glue on the inside of the strap where the end of the wire is to make sure the wire will stay in place and won't scratch the doll's foot.

All that is missing now are the wedge soles.

The strap looked a bit out of place as it was, so I decided to glue some leftover pieces to it.

Then it was time to glue the wedge soles in place and the ends of the toe straps to the sides of the soles, so the straps would keep their correct form.

Shoes for Sybarite

I found some tiny stickers and wanted to use them for doll shoes. As I hadn't made anything for the Sybarite in a long time, I decided to use the resin soles I made some time ago.

First step was painting them. I used two tiny plastic cups and attached the soles to them with double-sided mounting tape to be able to paint all sides at once (except the insoles). I used Revell Enamel Paint number 04 for these.

Here is the sheet of stickers. You can't really see the scale, but the photos further below will make that clear.

For the uppers, I decided to use clear plastic. Below you can see the type of plastic I'm using for the doll shoes. It is soft and doesn't show any creases even after doing this:

The insoles have two layers of cardboard and one layer of leather, and I painted the edges.

The following photos show the order of attaching the stickers.

I even decided to put some on the insoles where they would remain visible.

After attaching all stickers, it was time to apply sealer. Again I attached the soles to the plastic cups to get even layer of sealer on all sides.

The uppers are very simple as there is no point doing anything very elaborate when using clear plastic alone (without any stickers).

I cut the pieces from the plastic and used the lines in the pattern to attach pieces of double-sided adhesive tape to the parts that go under the insole.

After making holes to the flaps, I attached the uppers. For more information on why I made the holes, see an earlier blog post.

Then I just needed to glue the insoles in place. Here are the finished shoes from several angles.