Monster High shoes

The final wall-hanging display case has really small spaces, so only fairly small shoes fit into it. Mainly that means Monster High dolls, Sybarite and CED dolls. The link info below the picture again states for which dolls the shoes are made.

Row 1 - Decorative copper shoes, Madame Alexander's Alex: second pair, third pair; Tonner's Tiny Kitty: fourth pair, fifth pair

Row 2 - Monster High: first pair, second pair, third pair, fourth pair; Tonner's Tiny Kitty: fifth pair

Row 3 - Monster High: first pair, second pair, third pair, fourth pair, fifth pair

Row 4 - Monster High: first pair; Rini: second pair

Row 5 - Sybarite: first pair, second pair, third pair, fourth pair, fifth pair

Row 6 - Sybarite: first pair, second pair

Row 8 - CED doll (Finnish blog): first pair, second pair

Row 9 - CED doll (Finnish blog): first pair, second pair

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.

Old project finished

I have a lot of unfinished projects, which may or may not get finished one day. This one was from 2010 and the shoes were only missing the heels. The first three photos are from 2010 and the rest were taken today.

The straps are connected together by a short piece of ribbon underneath, which ensures that the decorations remain in correct positions in relation to each other.

The insoles are covered with pieces of fabric.

Here are the soles with straps in place.

The heels are made of polymer clay. They were originally made for a different doll, so they were much too long and needed all sorts of other adjustments as well.

As I needed to carve the heels quite a lot, I decided to cover them with leather to hide all the marks left by carving.

Here are the finished shoes on Sybarite Savoy.

New foot lasts

Going through the stuff inspired me to do something else as well. I decided to use the rest of the casting resin before it goes bad. The latex is also getting a bit thick, so it's better to use it as well. So, I'm making some more foot lasts.

All this has been done before and posted in this blog, but here are some photos anyway. The first one shows Sybarite's feet with flower tape around the ankles and several layers of latex applied.

The next one is Tonner's Jessica Rabbit (17" athletic body). First with flower tape covering the ankle joints...

...and then with latex applied.

Here are the finished moulds for both.

And here are the resin castings made with the moulds. You can see the flower tape clearly, but it is much neater than saran wrap.

As you can see in this photo showing the earlier plaster castings of Sybarite's feet and the new resin castings.

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.