Shoe Designs - The gentleman's envy

The Gentleman's envy:

The Dressing Bird

For the blight of you all, I took a break from blogging after finishing Nina's bespoke high heels. So, because I had a few sketches in my book just waiting for some ink, I thought I'd share it with all of you.

So there, one can clearly see my love for two toned heels. Another quite obvious fact is, that currently I'm just drooling on the high heel which took it's style from the traditional men's dress shoes. As most of you might know, this is a brogue. The connoisseur would call it a full brogue oxford, coming from the W-styled toe cap. This cap cut is also known as the wingtip. The definition brogue means that most (if not all) of the pieces's edges have perforation decorations.

Gentlemen's dress shoes + women's high heels = <3

A simple equation.

~ Otso

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.

Making High Heel Boots - Part 2 Test patterns

Now that we've got the lasts done, think about this challenge: you have a three dimensional object with curvy shapes and all, and you're supposed to draw patterns to it. All the more, patterns that can be reused and modified later. How on earth could that be possible? With your everyday masking tape! :D
Here I'll demonstrate how the patterns are born to a shoe.

Let's see how:

First the last is covered with masking tape in an orderly fashion.

Like so.

Next, the excess is cut thorough the edges of the sole.

Like so :)

Then, some necessary markings and a central line to the front and back.

And a cut along the middle lines.

And thus we'll have the inner and the outer sides of the last. Which are then removed separately, like seen in this picture.

They'll be a pair of quirky, mischievous pieces of masking tape after...

...So we'll discipline them flat on a cardboard.

Both of them are drawn on top of each other, to produce a single pattern.

When cutting the copy, some of the areas are halved.

And there it is! If the lasts remain the same, with this pattern one can now draw any kind of design on them.

I have to admit, I'm not very knowledgeable when it comes to drawing patterns. So luckily I've a very skilled colleague, a sturdy professional, Mr. Joonas. This base pattern is 99% his handwork. I just basically drew two lines to it.

Seriously, even Joonas was hesitant of the design, so I'll just have to make a test run with it. Then I'll see how different things'll work.

Next up is cutting the pattern pieces and using them to cut the leathers. And skiving and sewing the leathers, so we'll see what's up with the uppers. Cheerio!

Lesteille täytyy seuraavaksi tehdä kaavat. Yllä esitellään kuinka kolmiulotteisesta lestistä kopioidaan muodot kaksi ulotteisiksi, käyttäen maalarinteippiä :) Useiden vaiheiden jälkeen on viimeisinä kahtena kuvana kollegani Hra. Joonaksen mestarillinen kaavoitus. Itseltäni ei tuo kaavoitus oikein vielä näin mallikkaasti suju, joten oli mahtavaa saada rautaisen ammattilaisen apua. Seuraavaksi sitten leikataan kaavapalat sekä niitä hyödyntäen päällisnahat. Näin päästään testailemaan miten kaavat toimivat.

My vintage designs

As many of you might have noticed, I have a soft spot for vintage ladies shoes and designs. Right now there's something magical with the late 19th to early 20th century shoes. The earliest shoe designers started when the industrial revolution began, and shoes were getting cheaper, thanks to machinery. Before that every pair was completely hand made and took a hell of a lot more time to make and was thus also very heavy on one's purse. The industrial shoe making has climaxed to our time when you can get a pair of leather shoes for way less than 20€ from many stores. In contrast, completely hand made bespoke dress shoes cost about 2000€ - 3000€ in europe nowadays. And that's the starting price.

I can preach about that subject more in the future, now it's time to go back to business:

I drew these designs heavily inspired by some vintage shoes, and men's fancy dress shoes of old. There's just something very applicable when transforming classic men's dress shoe designs to women's high heels:

The left one's inspired by a boot design from the 1920's. The right one is an adaptation of a classic men's ankle boot model, that's still manufactured by some brands.

Making Ballerinas - Part 8 Lasting

Lasting is the actualization of the shoe: the lasts and the insole merge with the uppers to create a three dimensional object: the shoe. It's done by placing the uppers on the last and pulling them tightly under the insole where they are attached to with contact glue. There's something magical and rewarding when you've lasted a pair of beautiful shoes. The previous phases of taking measures, designing, shaping the lasts, making the patterns, fixing the last and the patterns, cutting the leathers, sewing the uppers and making the insole come into completion in this phase. The shoe comes alive! Let's see how:

The uppers are placed on the last.

The side stiffeners receive some carpenters glue.

The first pull after checking that the back strap is at the correct height and the uppers are straight.

The uppers are attached to the insole from three key points, this is called the front pull.

At this point it's good to check out the upper side. If the uppers are straight then we can proceed. With this kind of design I thought it would be easier to nail the excess lining to the last so that they won't drop too low when pulling them.

Then the back part of the uppers and lining are glued and nailed. The front is left open so we can glue only the lining to the insole.

The uppers are lifted so that a toe stiffener made of leather can  be glued on the toe part.

After attaching and some grinding the toe stiffener is covered with carpenters glue.

And the upper is again turned on everything and some contact glue is applied. After this the uppers are attached and nailed to the insole systemically.

And voilá! It's a pair of shoes!

A side view.

And the ever lovely toe part with the bow.

Next up: building the outer sole! Almost finished!

Making Ballerinas - Part 6 Sewing

With sewing, I wanted to take an old fashioned approach: a thin thread (60) and a thin needle (90), and do a extremely short stitch of about 1mm in length. This kind of stitching was common in shoes in the beginning of the 20th century, and if you ever visit a shoe-museum (there's one in Tampere, Finland called Vapriikki) check the stitching in old shoes, for a craftsman they're absolutely marvellous! One might think that "what the hell, it's only stitching, who cares?" But stitching is actually one of the most important aspects when making shoes: not only does it define the whole aesthetics of the shoe but has a strong importance even on the durability: dress shoes tend to have a thin and usually only one row of stitching. The heavy work shoe can have a thick thread with possibly up to four parallel rows.

An example of the change in the history of stitching shoes: left is a men's boot from early 20th century, and on the right a similar article from the 21st century. See the difference?

Ok, lets get back to business:

The leather edges have to be made thin wherever needed, this is called skiving. Skiving is done for different reasons, of which the two most common are; having different kind of seams and edges and to make the edges of the leathers that go under other leather layers to be non-visible to the surface. This is a skiving machine with a rotating blade, and I can make a more detailed post of this if anyone fancies that.

Here's a closeup of a skived piece, where you can see that the flesh side is close to it's normal thickness on the other side of the skive and the edge is almost 0mm thick. This is a folded edge skiving. See below for more info :)

Skiving at it's most traditional: with a curved knife. I skived only a thin line from the edge because it was my first time skiving alcantara and it doesn't work like leather so I had to be careful.

Skiving can also be done with a grinding machine, though only for the things hidden between the lining and uppers. You can see the difference in these side-stiffeners: the left one hasn't been skived.

A non-flexible and incredibly thin folding thread is glued 6mm away from the edge and necessary cuts  are made to make the folding easier as seen on the right piece. The edge is folded with contact glue underneath the leather on the left piece.

I folded the alcantara pieces too, to get as neat a look as possible.

And there you have it, all the pieces folded and ready for sewing! Well, no folding for the lining though ;)

And here's what a shoemakers best friend looks like. It takes alot of sewing before one gets friendly with  basically any kind of machine, and sowing machines are especially quirky.

It has a kind of a pole whereon it's easy to sew shoe uppers, since they're quite small and have
more three dimentional shapes.

Once all the sewing is done, I glue the side-stiffeners to the lining.

The surplus lining is cut away with scissors...

...And here's what you end up looking from the other side. Then the lining edges are painted black so that they won't "jump out".

And the uppers are ready to be lasted!

And a finishing touch is the bows. Here you can see the old fashioned small stitching , and my lack of experience with  both the particular sewing machine and the stitching.

Next up is lasting!

Making Ballerinas - Part 5 The new design

At last! The project posts continue! It took me some time, but maybe after seeing it you'll understand why it takes relatively long time to make shoes. Especially if one has only his spare time to do them.
Anyhow, this post was originally meant to be longer but I had to split it in two parts because of it's image volume: 23. So, in this first part I'll just introduce to you all the fixed new design and some steps after. Enjoy.

Here you'll see the difference: the upper is the old design with the "wings" and below the fixed version that I'll make into the actual ballerinas. 

The different pattern pieces are copied through the basic copy to another cardboard.

Allowances and other markings are made with specific tools.

Holes are punched to guidance points. This will help you place the uppers in correct positions.

The templates are then cut out with a knife.

And here's all the templates we need to make the uppers :)

The templates are then used to draw them on the material of your choice.

All the templates are drawn. It's scissoring time!

And here's every piece ready for the next phase: skiving and sewing. My material choices were: regular cow leather on the front pieces, artificial suede called alcantara (used usually in car upholstery and couches) for the back pieces and goat leather for the linings. As a bonus there's vegetally tanned 1mm side stiffeners that'll... well, stiffen the sides :) They'll go hidden between the uppers and the lining. But more of that later.

Next up is the sewing and making the insole. See you soon!