Shoe size comparison

I ordered a Basic Miss Piggy in May and she has finally arrived. She's about as tall as Tonner's 16" dolls, but as you can guess, she's a bit wider. The picture below shows her with Sybarite Savoy.

Because she is a Basic Miss Piggy, the outfit is simple and so are the shoes, which are on the right side in the following picture. On the left are shoes for Sybarite and in the middle shoes for American Model.

As you can see, Miss Piggy's feet are considerably bigger, which is a good thing as it means more room for details in the shoes. Right now I'm making latex moulds of her feet and next I will make plaster castings of them. Then I will hopefully have time for making something interesting. I guess it's time to look at the shoe books and calendars for some inspiration.
For the Finnish post, see here.

Christian Dior shoes for Silkstone Barbie

I've got the Shoes Gallery Calendar 2009 (Page a Day Gallery Calendar) and I noticed something interesting when I bought a Barbie outfit set a couple of weeks ago.

The picture for May 4th was a Christian Dior shoe from 2007:




And this is the pair from Mattel's Barbie outfit pack (it had three dresses for Barbie and a groom outfit for Ken):




The similarity is quite remarkable, although the Barbie shoes are much too small to include that twisted strip structure the Christian Dior shoe has.

For the Finnish post, see here.

Silver leather ankle boots for Sybarite

I got the idea for these ankle boots from two pictures in the book A Century of Shoes: Icons of Style in the 20th Century. The pictures are these:


The good thing about this design is that it is a lot easier to make than normal ankle boot as the parts to be glued under the inner sole are almost straight.

I used a pair of soles I cast using casting resin. The color is a bit off in the picture as the soles are actually pale blue.


I drew a pattern first and marked the places for holes in it. Then I cut the pieces out of leather and marked the places for holes in them using the pattern.


The special tools needed are the pliers for making the holes and the tool for attaching the eyelets.


Here are the leather pieces with eyelets in place, but not hammered flat yet (if you want to see how to attach the eyelets, see the beginning of the video in the previous post). The eyelets are even paler blue than the soles. I would have preferred smaller eyelets in a slightly darker shade, but these were all I got.


Here are the inner soles before cutting the extra leather around the cardboard soles. As the outer soles are made of hard resin, the inner soles only consist of one piece of cardboard and one piece of leather. This is enough to keep the form during the assembly.


Here are the boots before gluing the outer soles in place.


And here are the finished boots.


For the Finnish post, see here.

Making boots for a Pipos Baha Cat BJD, part II

Here is the second part of the video for making the Baha Cat boots.




The boots with the polymer clay outer soles glued in place.


With laces made of cotton yarn.


And last, but not least, Baha Cat in an outside photo shoot.





Earlier posts on the subject:
Mould making: Flat soles with Sculpey Mold Maker
Making a foot last for a doll with flat feet
Making boots for a Pipos Baha Cat BJD, part I

For the Finnish post, see here.

Making boots for a Pipos Baha Cat BJD, part I

I decided to make the red leather boots first. They are not finished yet, so this is just the first part. The picture below shows what is finished so far.


The video below shows the progress so far. The rest will be in part II.




Earlier posts on the subject:
Mould making: Flat soles with Sculpey Mold Maker
Making a foot last for a doll with flat feet

For the Finnish post, see here.

Making a foot last for a doll with flat feet

I have usually made plaster castings of dolls' feet for making shoes for them, but BJDs are a bit difficult in that respect. They have open joints in ankles, so it is very hard to make a latex mould of their feet. I have done it with Sybarite, but I decided to try something else with the Pipos Baha Cat.

I carved a foot last out of balsa wood. It will be used for boots, so it doesn't matter if it is not exactly the right size as long as it is bigger than the doll's foot. After carving and sanding, I painted the last with acrylic paint.


As you can see, it is roughly the size and shape of the doll's foot. The exact shape depends on what kind of toe part the shoes are to have. I decided to make it round as that fits best the overall shape of the foot.


Afterwards, I thought that as I am going to use this for boots, maybe it would be better to have the ankle in it as well. So, I glued another piece of balsa wood on top of the last and carved the ankle part.


I will use this for making boots using the soles I made earlier out of polymer clay.

For the Finnish post, see here.

Shoes that will fit Silkstone Barbies (and Fashion Royalty)

Here are some shoes that will fit Silkstone Barbies and some also fit the Hollywood Royalty Lana Turner doll, which has wider feet than Silkstone Barbies. The doll wearing the shoes in the pictures is a Spa Giftset Silkstone Barbie.

The first pair is from a set specifically for Silkstone Barbies. These slingbacks also fit Lana Turner as they are made of a bit softer plastic than the other pairs of the set.


This pair is from the same set, I think. I thought I'd never find anything for my Barbies to wear that would go with these, but the dress I made for Lana has orange, so these shoes go with it. Unfortunately, the shoes don't fit Lana that well, but at least the dress fits Silkstone Barbies.


This is a cheap pair of shoes made of fairly soft plastic. You can get these on a Silkstone Barbie only just and I expect them to break at some point when putting them on or taking them off.


This is another cheap pair I ordered at the same time as the ones in the picture above. Unfortunately, I don't remember anymore where I got these.


These are Fashion Fever Barbie shoes and soft enough to get onto Silkstone Barbie's feet.


This pair is from a fairly new set of Barbie shoes from Mattel. These also fit Lana.


This pair is from Bob Mackie's Cher Barbie.


These came with a cheap Barbie in a neon green dress.


These are from 1970's and I think they are original Mattel shoes, but I'm not sure. They originally had ankle straps, but I remember cutting them off, because they were too difficult to use. I've also got a similar pair in yellow.


These are also from 1970's. These fit basically any Barbie sized doll.


The last two pairs are ReMent shoes and both pairs fit Lana as well. (I got these from Miss Blythe store, which is in Portugal.)




For the Finnish post, see here.