Patent leather shoes

These shoes are for a Living Dead Doll and they are made basically the same way as loafers for Anges Dreary. There are a couple of differences, though.

First, these shoes have a pronounced heel, although the insole is quite flat. This is achieved by gluing several layers of cardboard in the other end, but leaving the heel with only one or two layers.

The material is patent leather, which is thick, so the only way to make fairly invisible seams was to sew them. In Agnes' shoes, the back seam is glued, but with this material that was not an option. I treated the inside of the leather with sealer, because the Living Dead Dolls seem to be much more prone to staining than other dolls, probably because of the matte surface of these dolls.

Here are the uppers with all seams sewn. When gluing the back seam, I do that only after gluing a few tabs of the upper under the insole, but with sewing, you need to finish the back seam before any gluing.

This is how the finished shoes look like. In Agnes' shoes, there were only two layers of leather for the heel and even that caused some balance issues. Here there are four layers of fairly thick leather glued together to form the heel and the doll stays in balance just fine, because inside the shoe, the sole is flat and level.

The doll's feet are sort of wedge-shaped and the extra layers of cardboard do not make the shoes look in any way odd. In fact, the shoes look more normal than ones with entirely flat soles would look, because this structure corrects the shape of the feet.

Old-fashioned boots

I've been planning on making some kind of old-fashioned boots for some doll. As Miss Piggy has so large feet, she was ideal for this.

First, here are the soles made of two layers of cardboard glued together to form the correct shape. The small pieces are made of air-drying modeling clay and are to be glued to the soles to get the correct form for the toe part.


I decided to use thick fabric for these boots. The edges of the fabric are again treated with Fray Stop. The part shown in the middle is actually same shape and size as I used for the red boots.


The heels are plaster castings. This is the shape of heel found in many old shoes. It probably has something to do with the structure of the heel as old shoes often have stacked heels and those tend to be quite thick. Of course in this case, the shape could be anything, although plaster isn't practical for very thin parts. As these heels will be covered in fabric, plaster is fine for them.


Here you can see one part of the upper glued in place and the back seam of the two other parts glued as well. The heel is covered using same fabric, glued in place using PVA glue.


Just testing how the heel will look once in place.


The hardest part is done now. When using the same fabric on the heels, make sure the parts of the upper turned under the sole cover the edges properly as the outer sole won't extend all the way back, but will stop in front of the heel.


This time I didn't use eyelets for the laces, but pieces of trimming that double as decorations.


Here are a couple of pictures of the finished boots.

Red boots

These are soles for boots for a doll with flat feet. The soles are made of balsa wood, which is very easy to carve, and painted black on the sides, which will remain visible. You can paint them all black, but it isn't necessary.


Here are the upper parts for the boots. The edges of the fabric were treated with Fray Stop to keep them neat, although this fabric wasn't fraying much anyway (I guess that's because it seems to be in two layers, which are attached to each other probably with some sort of glue).


Here are the toe parts glued in place to cardboard and leather insoles.


The fabric felt a bit too thin for the eyelets, so I glued strips of leather on the reverse side for added strength before making the holes and attaching the eyelets.


Then it was just gluing these parts in place, gluing the balsa outer soles, and adding cotton yarn for laces.

Silver sandals for Sybarite

These sandals started with two small pieces of balsa wood cut into shape and painted black.


Then I made the insoles of cardboard and glued them into the balsa pieces. I took the picture before painting the other one, so you can see the shape of the cardboard and how it was glued in place.


Next, I glued silver colored leather to the insole. Usually it would have come later, but as I wasn't going to glue the edges of the uppers under the insole, this could be done at this point.


The next picture shows the rest of the leather parts in place.


Here is a closeup of the mechanism used for the ankle straps. The other end of the strap only needs a loop into which you insert the hook. The hook is bent slightly outwards to prevent it from scratching the doll's foot. This is a simple, but effective mechanism. The only difficulty is determining exactly the correct length for the strap, so that it will be possible to insert the hook, but the strap isn't left too loose.


Finally, here is a photo of the shoes on the doll's feet. The heels are made of balsa wood and covered with the same silver colored leather.

Blue sandals for Miss Piggy

Here are pieces for another pair of sandals for Miss Piggy. The straps are cardwoven bands cut to suitable lengths and glued to a piece that goes around the bundle. The white pieces consist of a few layers of cardboard glued together in correct shape and they go in between the insole and outer sole. The beige pieces are insoles made of leather and glued to one layer of cardboard to keep the desired shape.


Next stage was gluing the straps in place and painting the edges of the in-between soles.


Longer straps were glued under the heel and these straps were to have buckles. As the cardwoven band is quite thick, I used small strips of leather to glue the buckles in place. A strip goes around the middle part of a buckle and the ends of the strip are glued in place so that the end of the strap is between them.


Here are the finished shoes. The outer soles are made of thick blue leather and the heels are made of wood and painted to match the color of the shoes.

Manolo Blahnik copy

As I was thinking of making copies of Manolo Blahnik shoes for a doll, I was thinking about high heels, but I ended up making something else instead.

The original shoe looks like this:


I used brown leather for the doll shoes as there was enough of it and I also had matching satin for the inside.

The pattern for the upper was easy to make by modifying a previous pattern.


After I had glued the upper in place, I glued satin to the inside parts that would remain visible and fixed them into the correct shape with adhesive tape while the glue hadn't dried yet.


When the glue was dry, I removed the tape and cut off extra fabric. The parts remained in the desired shape well enough.


Here are the finished shoes in plaster castings of the doll's feet.


For the Finnish post, see here.

I am psychic

A little while ago, I bought a magazine called "Vogue Collections numéro 9 - Spring-Summer 2010" to get all 110 pages of shoe pictures included in it. As I was going through the pictures, I found something interesting on page 302, which had photos of Roberto Cavalli's shoes.

Here is one of the shoes shown on that page. Take a good look at the sole...


and then compare it to this:



I made these shoes in July 2007. (For the English description published later, see here.) The basic structure of the sole is similar, although not quite the same.