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!

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!

Eallin

The leather soles came out great! Thank you Christian Loboutin for the idea ;)

OOps! The left stiching went baaad.  Well enough this was a test pair, and not a client work.

This is the vision I had, when I heard there was going to be a fashion exhibition in the Sámi Museum in Inari, in 2010. Back then I had just started to be very anxious and interested in high heels and the aesthetic possibilities they'd offer, so I had just a couple of months to design, draw patterns, make the uppers, last them and finally build a heel and glue the leather outer sole to them. These were also the first high heels I've done.

The uppers consist of two very exotic items; traditionally tanned reindeer leather called sisna and reindeer leg fur. Sisna is commonly used by the Sámi in clothing and accessories (bags, pouches), and sometimes for footwear too. This sisna had it's fur removed, vegetal tanning with willow bark, softening and oiling all done by me. It was part of the education program in the institute. Sisna has also a very fragile surface atleast for shoes, but a nice texture to it.
The leg furs are pretty amazing too, coz they're with a very short and smooth hair, a rare item of a summer reindeer. The leg part of the fur is traditionally used to make winter footwear called "nutukkaat". Got all my leg fur from a dear friend in lapland.

I shaped the heels from two blocks of oak which I got from slöjd detaljer. And added pieces of actual reindeer antlers to create a nice whitish effect to them. They were in the Reindeer Fashion exhibition for a few months. This was the first exhibition for me, and quite exciting!

-Otso