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!

Some shoe designing & resting

Dear readers & visitors, I'd like to thank you all for your interest so far. My blog has launched pretty nicely and got some good attention from people, and it's a pity that I've been a bit under the weather for the past few days. I'd like to post more often and let you all see how the ballerinas are done, but the flue's taken my strength.

Anyways, a few days back I had a vision of two different high heels that I just had to draw down, and I thought that today's a great day to share them with you all. These kind of designs would maybe be something I'd have in my own boutique for sell, so tell me: would you buy yourself a pair?

On the left is a white leather bootie with a tattoo inspired drawing on it and the left is a pink/grey striped canvas boot. Maybe satin?The left shoe feels that it needs some more designing, but to the right one I'm very happy with!

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I would like to wish all my readers a very very happy mid-summer festivities and a great weekend! I'll try to get some advancement posts done on the ballerina project in a few days.

Cheerio!

And away he went...

...But he came back! Mr. Shoemaker just took a cruise yesterday, and had the opportunity to try on those Spectators with an all black suit. And, even though the suit's nothing special, it brought the attention to the shoes quite nicely!

Luckily it's time for my trusted barber, Rody Maher in viisikulma, Helsinki to do his magic on my head, coz it's starting to look abit... hmm, bushy.

Yenni

As my first official post, you see a pair of shoes that I made to a friend. They're truly bespoke, with full leather lining and uppers, wooden leather covered heel that I sculpted and a leather sole. This was a visionary project given as a surprise birthday gift to a friend <3