Nina's

Ladies & Gents! After several months of waiting and about 90 pure handmade working hours; I'm proud to present the newest creation by yours truly! A project for the amazingly beautiful Niina, from the fashion blog Nelliinan vaatehuone.

*Drum roll...*

Nina's

I think I was quite obedient to the original drawing, though some changes did occur. Naturally :)

Taken from her blog (28.2.2012): here.

Taken from her blog (26.10.2012): here.

Materials:

• Collar: Black suede with a black sheep nappa lining
• Bow: Black patent leather ring with black alcantara bows.
• Uppers: Cream white nubuck, Black patent leather.
• Heel: Black patent leather covered plastic heel.
• Sole: Vegetable tanned leather with an black 4mm rubber half sole.

What can I say? Well, I'm pretty satisfied with the outcome, being my first bespoke high heels... I'd say I'm REALLY pleased. There's a million little things that could've gone better, but then again a million little things that I learned. So that's a alot! 

I'll update images of Niina wearing them from her posts later on.
One can only say: Tally hooooo!

Making Bespoke High heels - Part 8 The Insole and Heel

Well, before lasting, one has to have an insole. Insole creates a spine on which the other components are fastened. By various methods I might add. My method is the cemented (glued) structure, which originates from around the middle part of the last century. It's quite modern, but one of the most common structures these days. The  gentleman with an keen eye on quality dress shoes despises this structure, but to my mind it's well fitting for ladies shoes. Although there's only the adhesive (another english word for glue ;) that keeps the structure together, it's a long lasting shoe construct that's quite easy to repair and faster to make too.

Back to business:

First to draw an approximate outline on a 3mm thick purely oak tanned insanely beautiful german traditional  leather.
Too much adjectives? ;)

After cutting, the pieces are scraped with... a piece of broken glass?
Yes.

Many of you might not know about the great qualities of vegetable tanned leather: it might be quite stiff when dry like this type of leather I'm using, but after soaking them in water they turn into the mother of all elastics and completely formable. A beautiful traditional material. <Sorry for the blurry pic!>

The wet leather is fastened with nails to the last.

A carefully applied rubber band.

Voilá! All wrapped and left to dry to shape.

To add some modern high tech; I put the first supportive layer out of 0,8mm carbon fibre plate. Heat formable stuff.

And because with high heels the arch needs to be as stiff as possible, I'm going for the ultimate. I'll laminate this piece of steel between two layers of carbon fibre.

Sadly, I didn't have any more detailed images on the actual process of making these.
But here's one, all ready for action. You can see that right after the heel part the edge is trimmed almost to zero. But there's a heavier supportive ridge at the center, which you can see better in the picture below.

A bottom view. The steel shank is laminated within those layers of carbon fibre.
And the heel is what I actually worked on for a full day's worth of time... For nothing. I found a perfect match for these lasts from a box. At my work. Perfect. That was a bit annoying. All that work for nothing.

Another rub of salt on my broken nerves.

And these are the babies I found. I've done some grinding on the top parts only. To get them fitting perfectly to the insole.

Next, it's lasting for sure :) See you soon!

The lavender bird

At the beginning of this week I was studying at Kankaanpää, and I was in the middle of making a mockup, cutting the uppers and closing (sewing). I dreamed of lasting the uppers, but it turned out I was way too optimistic to start with.
All in all, I learned good tips about making patterns, how to do them more properly, so that the process of making the shoes becomes easier. While following my tutor's advice, the uppers basically just "sat" on the lasts. This means I'll have to do minimal efforts while lasting. Which is sweet :)
Pattern drawing is one tough nut, but I think I'm already doing some scratches to it's surface.

About the project at hand; for a few months now, my obsession has been on making various brogue styled high heels, so this was a very welcome practise. Hopefully I'll get those two pairs of boots finished soon, so I'll be busy with something new for a change.

I know, I skipped alot. Again. But it's not a tutorial :) Anyways, here's the prototype, which I wanted to do before wasting precious leather. It came out really good! With these kind of traditional cuts, like the "full brogue" envisioned here, one has to be careful with the proportions, as it's really easy to ruin the look with the wrong ones. So I was kinda lucky to get it right at the first try :) What do you think?

This is why I call it a bird: the front looks like a strange bird's beak.

Someone's crazy idea was to have a folding seam on each piece.

Here they are, all lavender suede :) Unfortunately we'll have to wait until march for them to be ready, because I couldn't  take the lasts with me.

What say you?

Next up, the visit to Pertti Palmroth's now silent factory...

Studying the essence of a high heel

For those that missed my morning announcement on facebook; I'm currently having a three day educational period in Kankaanpää, as a part of my Master Shoemaker studies.
When I first came this morning, I had no idea what was going to happen. So I made a mistake by not bringing some high heel lasts or previous patterns I had made. Even though it was all awkward for me, my instructor quickly guided me to begin a test project from a pair of vintage heel lasts.

Let's see  what happened today:

This is the last. Now, I won't modify it in any way, just design something and eventually make it.  Luckily, they had some components ready: the heels and the insoles are ready :) which makes my work alot easier.

I'm currently not a big fan of pointy heels. Maybe that'll change some day?

As another proof of their antiquity: they've been cast on a wooden block.

A wooden filling inside a brass tube. You ain't gonna see this kind of construction anywhere anymore. These babies have to be nailed.

The insoles are an almost fit. Needs some tinkering.

This is the sketch I did. A full brogue oxford cut. Well planned is half done.

Next up was making the tape copy.

And that 3D shape transformed into 2D.

And this is waiting for tomorrow's mockup.

Making High Heel Boots - Part 6 Cutting the leather uppers

Well, after almost three months of wait we're back to business with Niina's high heels! Groovy!
I've made progress during this time, but waited to get things decent for a logic continuum.

Without further due: Last time I made little changes to the lasts and sent a shoe for Niina to be tried, and she gave the ok. So now, all I had to do was to draw the patterns for the third time :) Well, it's the charm 'innit?
After the base-pattern, I cut all the pieces out and used them to cut the leathers for the uppers.
So they're all leather. Inside and outside. Just the way I like it.

A little peek, ladies & gents?

All the pieces. The base-pattern is in the middle.

The base is used to "cut out" all the necessary individual pieces.

My choice of materials:
(From the left) Black Patent leather, Cream Nubuck, Black Suede, Black nappa leather (thin, for lining),  White  supporting cloth.

My choice of tools:
(From the left) Punching awl, silver grease pen (for erasable markings),  clicker's knife (clicker=leather cutter person), two sharpening sticks with grit 600 and 1200 glued to them. Used to sharpen the knife.

The blade has to be like a razor. Period.

And after a few hours, here's all the pieces ready for sewing.

In a shoe factory, the clicker is an actual separate profession. After years of cutting leather, one learns to be fast, has a precise cut, learns to avoid faults in the leather and above all is economic. These are qualities that I'm not too strong in. Yet. Hence the long consumption of time. A pro would've done this in about 15 minutes

Next up sewing.   

Ready, steady, why ain't they ready... already?

Whoops! It's time to take a look at what's happened during the past week. I got another project request from a possible client: mid to high heel black boots with a twist of rock 'n roll. So I started drawing:

I made three designs on an convenient A4 size with an explanatory text portion and a neat small blueprint to help understand how different materials are divided.

And here's all three of them. I also made a special heel versions of these as requested by the client, but I'll show it to you all later when we've finalized the design. So far the one on the right is leading, but it'll go through some serious changes.

After work, it was good to test something that's been boggling my mind recently: to make french patina shoes. It's a traditional method of producing high end dress shoes (NOT the only one, though): you make the shoes normally but use a traditional vegetable tanned leather to make the uppers. The same as you use to make Lapikkaat, which are very familiar to all you Finns. You last them normally like on the leftmost shoe. Then you apply leather dye with a cloth as is done on the middle shoe. After drying it's burnishing, oiling and waxing. This way the colors get a deep tone to them, and the surface looks alive instead of even and plastic-like.

I'll still make new patterns and a new mockup of Niina's shoes, since I'm not very satisfied with the current situation.