Monday, July 11

Making Ballerinas - Part 9 The outer sole

Making the outer soles can be sometimes frustrating: You're so close to completion of the shoes and then you start to get anxious and impatient, especially when all the time you have is basically the late evening/night, so you want to finish them quickly. Well, they turned out ok after all. But I still feel I could've done them better: lots of little details were left ugly and proper tools are missing. Making outer soles is alot about finishing, and when you're dealing with leather one has to pay great attention to details, unless you're just gonna paint it all black.
Enough blabbing my mouth, let's cut to the chase:


Here it all begins: I removed the nails and cut the excess leather out  from the undergoing uppers and lining. Then I cut two shanks out of carbon-fibre plate, and cork fillings.

Everything grinded and ready to take on the outer sole.

On the left is a glued, compressed and shaped outer sole with two shaping chisels. The left shoe has it's glued and skived outer sole waiting to be pressed.

A close up of the pressed on logo

I've fallen in love with the red soles, so I'm at it again.

Coloured. Still a bit wet though.

The formed half soles and heel rubbers with the grinded outer soles ready to be glued.

I want to reveal the outcome of the soles later, so next up was pulling the nails out from the lining.

I removed the lasts and made insole linings with the logo print.
And it was time to spread some polish, spray some care products, polish and oil the outer sole.

Sorry all this hidden mystery in the post, but I wanted to save up the details and everything to the actual reveal. Which is tomorrow! See you then!

6 comments:

  1. hieno on tuo logo kengässä ja ihana sydän pohjassa. ja vika kuva jotenkin tosi hauska myöskin.

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  2. Unikuu: Hyvä hyvä, sinunhan jalkaan ne ovat tulossa ;)

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  3. goddamn boi! i envy your craftmanship skillz! makes me wanna do/create sumtin as skillful and beautiful :)

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  4. Mr. Chocolate: I am honored by your kind words! You should definitely start creating something, just let me know when you do, ok? :D

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  5. Wow. One never thought how much work goes into making a pair of shoes. Unikuu's such a lucky woman! And her feet are especially lucky! The shoes are looking super comfy with the soft leather and everything! I never thought you could write our surname so beautifully, too! <3 Aww, I'm so loving these shoes!

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  6. Saana: Yes, the amount of time, skill and knowledge on various fields is quite an amount and is required to make a good pair of shoes.
    And Mäensivu isn't maybe the most media sexy name, but it can be made that ;)
    And thank you for your appreciative words!

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