Wednesday, April 2, 2014

Handmade Shoes

More than 20 years ago, probably closer to 30, (damn!) I bought a book that told in detail how to make shoes. I really wanted to give it a try but it seemed like too much messy, tedious work and, since this was before the Internet, even obtaining all the proper supplies would have been a bit of an ordeal so I never got around to it. But lately I started thinking about it again and, of course, did some googling.

Here is a serviceable pair of hiking shoes. The exciting thing about these, for me, is that you can buy Vibram soling by the sheet. I'll have to look into that.

Of course, if it can be imagined someone is already selling it on Etsy. Those are quite nice and very professional looking.

Instructions for making your own shoes. This is pretty close to what I remember from the book. For some reason the idea of making a custom last is the most off-putting part.

More shoemaking instructions. This might be the author of the book I bought years ago (I'm sure I still have it somewhere) and these are more like the kind of shoes I had in mind (the flats of course) - something cute and comfortable to wear with dresses.

And more instructions at WikiHow

Finally here are the results for "homemade shoes" on Flickr. (Quite a few of the photos that came up are NOT, in fact, homemade shoes.) There are a lot of people out there doing this. I'm not confident in my ability to end up with shoes I would actually be willing to wear out of the house but I am getting closer to making an attempt.

No comments:

Post a Comment