The Paubellarinas

Inspiration can happen anytime. Whether sitting in a bus, doing work or watching opera, anywhere. This time my inspiration was a blog, maybe the first fashion blog I've ever gone to: Paubellas. I wanted to dedicate these shoes for her and her blog with their name: The Paubellarinas. My first comment in history was about some ballerinas she wore, and I started to ramble about how I couldn't understand them for the sheer reason on non-aesthetics that I thought flat shoes in general possess. Well, I got her sympathy for not understanding women in this issue, but a moment later some designs for ballerinas started whirling in my mind. So I drew them down, and decided to start a project in making a pair. And here they are ready. Such is inspiration.

These were done bespoke for my wife, who also keeps a lovely and successful children's clothing blog called Unikuun terapiahuone, with lots of elaborate applications and tailoring, check it out! She was very pleased, which was a relief since I didn't let her affect the design. Except in one thing, as you'll see in a moment:

The main ingredients: Calf leather and alcantara (synthetic) uppers. Full Goat leather lining. Colored red leather sole with rubber inserts.

And there's the wish my client had: to have a heart shaped something in the soles.

The signatured red soles. I know it's a rip-off from Christian Louboutin, but they just look sooo good :D

Thank you all so much for following this project! What should I do next? High heels? What would YOU like to see made?

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!

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!

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