Leather shoes with buckles for the Baha Cat

I made leather shoes with buckles for the Baha Cat to go with the folk costume I'm making for the doll. The shoes I've seen in photos vary, but the common factor is black leather and gold colored buckles, so these should be close enough.

Here are the parts for the shoes. The insoles are made of one layer of cardboard covered with leather.


I started by attaching the toe part. As these shoes need to go over the wool socks I have knitted for the doll, the doll needed to have the socks on to make sure the shoes would be big enough.


These parts form the back and sides of the shoes. I attached the buckle first, so I was able to check before gluing anything that I could get the opposite strap into it. To see how to glue these parts in place, see this earlier blog post.


Here are the finished shoes.


Here are the shoes on the doll's feet.

The actual book

The book arrived today. I took a picture so that I'm holding it to let you see the size. The print quality is good and my only grumble is that the insides of the covers are white although the background on the front and back covers and all pages is black, but it's a minor issue.


The preview below shows some pages from various parts of the book. The spreads are not shown correctly in the preview as it shows odd pages on left and even pages on right and it should be just the other way round.

Fashion Doll Shoes by Tarja Simpanen | Make Your Own Book

The Fashion Doll Shoes book

The book is ready. I've been going through the text over and over again after making the corrections suggested by the proofreader, but I finally decided that further editing would not improve it. I ordered my copy today and after I have received it and made sure there are no problems, I will make the book available in Blurb.

The book covers will look like this:

Suomenkielinen versio tulee saataville myöhemmin.

More cardboard stuff

Cardboard proved to be interesting material, so I had to experiment a bit more. Here are shoe soles for Jessica Rabbit (who has Tonner's Athletic Body with high heel feet). These are similar to the Barbie and Monster High shoes, except for the curved part in the heel.

Here the soles have been painted with gold paint.

I decided to make the insoles the same way as for the orange silk shoes. The main thing with these is to make sure there is glue only in the parts that go under the insoles, so the fabric stays neat. Also, be careful when cutting the triangular flaps. There should be no cut edges visible on the sides of the insoles.

I glued little loops for the straps. When you do it this way, you can glue the insoles to the outer soles before putting the straps in place, which makes things easier. Also, you can change the straps to different ones at any point, so you get a very versatile pair of shoes this way.

Finally, here are the finished shoes. You can vary the material, length and positioning of the straps to get different results.

Louboutin Barbie shoes

The Louboutin shoes for Barbie finally arrived. The first photo shows the contents of the set: 9 pairs of shoes, 9 shoe boxes, 9 shoe pouches with print, and a stack of silk paper. As you can see in this picture, also the insides of the shoes are painted, which is unusual. The outer soles have the signature red of Louboutin shoes.

My favorite pair is the red one. It is also one of the two pairs that fit Silkstone Barbies as you can see in the picture.

The blue pair also fits Silkstones and is almost as nice as the red.

The rest of the shoes only fit regular Barbies. Here they are shown on a Fashionistas Barbie. I didn't even bother to try the shoes on my Hollywood Royalty Lana Turner doll, as her feet are wider than Silkstone Barbie's. As you can see from some of the thinner heels, these shoes are made of fairly soft plastic. That means bending heels, but otherwise the shoes seem more durable than the ones made of harder plastic.

The black pair with ribbons is my third favorite.

The ankle straps of the shoes have an opening to get the shoes on the doll's feet. I'm not sure which Barbie these were designed for, but the straps won't go all the way around Fashionista's ankles.


The straps of the pink shoes are closed, but it was fairly easy to get the shoes on the doll's feet. When I saw the first photos of the set, I didn't think much of these, but they are actually quite nice.

The upmost strap of these shoes is open on the back and the opening leaves a huge gap.

The opening in this pair is similar to what is used in boots and looks much nicer than the way the black pair was made.

Making the left shoe

I haven't yet found the optimal doll foot for making shoes. A close one would be the Monster High doll foot in American Model size. I have also sometimes thought how easy it would be to just make one shoe, instead of having to make a pair of shoes that need to be mirror images of each other. I was thinking that especially with the recent cardboard experiments. So, I decided to take a slightly different point of view on making shoes. I am going to try to make some as purely sculptures and make just the left shoe.

For that, I still need a foot last, so I bought some air-dry modeling clay and made a last that will be good enough. The most important part is the arch of the foot for forming the shoe sole.


Another good thing about this sculptural approach is that I won't need to think about how to get the shoe on and off the foot once it is finished. All I need is to remember to take it off the foot last before adding any parts that would prevent me from doing that.

I think this is going to be fun.

Real shoes

I saw these one time as I was window shopping. Wouldn't mind having them myself, if only I could use them. Now I just took out my phone and snapped a photo.


I've been thinking of making similar doll shoes. It shouldn't be too hard, although bending six identical figures from metal wire could be a challenge.