kellan_the_tabby | a project: sandals

[A mockup of a sandal built from pink card stock. It has two straps across the front, and a single strap at the back, across the heel.]

So what with one thing & another I am now limited to only wearing shoes that work with my suddenly VERY picky feet. This is not awesome! I’ve been lucky enough to be able to wear basically whatever shoes I wanted for most of my life! (Okay, it helped that I’ve never liked wearing high heels, or shoes with pointy toeparts that squish your toes. But STILL). Suddenly I need to wear the right kind of shoes or my feet will become Very Angry!

That’s the down side. The up side is that the fancy, special shoes my feet need to be functional? Shoes with absolutely the fuck no foot support whatsoever.

… look, I don’t even know.

These days you can buy barefoot shoes lots of places, which is pretty delightful. Down side? Sixty bucks a pop, minimum. & I’d already spent a fair amount of money on shoes trying to find SOMETHING that would work.

Up side? If you don’t have to worry about anything but a flat sole, shoes are pretty easy. & it’s not like we don’t have any leather kicking around.

So I made myself some sandals.

[One of the straps from the pattern sits next to a strap cut from lapis blue leather. Sitting on top of both is a black metal tool rather like a vegetable peeler, but with the blade perpendicular to the handle.]

I only had to buy one tool, a skiver, seen above. One uses these to thin out the ends of the straps, in a case like this, so that one does not have lumps of strap sitting underneath one’s feet. That blade? _Extremely_ sharp.

… it took a while to get the hang of it.

[The skiver sits on a piece of white card stock, along with the blue strap and a whole lot of tiny crumbs of blue leather. The card stock has been cut into in several places.]

Turns out if you start on the smooth side (& also hold the skiver right), you can start taking off bigger pieces. & also that if you work on a metal jewelry anvil instead of a hunk of card stock, you won’t make such a mess. (Probably not the best thing for the blade, but, welp)

Anyway I pushed through the ‘I have no idea what I’m doing, I am so bad at this, I will never learn’ & started getting the hang of it. As witness:

[The skiver is sitting on top of a flat steel jewelry anvil, along with a bunch of much larger pieces of blue leather. The end of the strap is sitting under the skiver; it looks pretty thin at the edge.]

Once I was through all of that it was time to glue the straps on, which required me to mark where the straps GO, which is a whole lot easier with a metallic sharpie than with a black one if you’re using black leather.

[A leather sole sits on my desk, with a gold metallic sharpie sitting on top. Short gold lines have been drawn along the edge of the sole in a couple places.]

& then I had to sew everything together, which was painfully tedious, so I didn’t get any pics of that process at all. Lastly I glued two more sole layers to the bottom of the soles, sandwiching the strap ends between the layers — you don’t want to sew all the sole layers on, as the stitches will wear through really fast as you walk. Those get glued on, too.

[A finished sandal, seen from above. The lapis blue straps sit above a brown suede insole. Slightly paler brown stitches run around the entire outer edge of the sandal.]

It’s a good thing that contact cement cures quickly, because I had maybe a half hour between glueing the last bits on & running out the door. But they look great!

[Sandals on my feet! They’re held on by lapis blue laces around my ankles. The edge of one of them, where the front straps run between the sole layers, is already pulling apart slightly. But they look pretty!]

Of course I already have plans for my next pair, & of course, there’s things I need to fix. But they work, & I have shoes again!

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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

>>So what with one thing & another I am now limited to only wearing shoes that work with my suddenly VERY picky feet. <<

That sucks so much! Mine have always required specific, somewhat hard to find parameters. >_<

>>The up side is that the fancy, special shoes my feet need to be functional? Shoes with absolutely the fuck no foot support whatsoever.<<

Moccasins rarely have more than a lightweight sole and maybe a flat pad inside, very flexible; traditional ones don't even have that, just the leather. You may find some cheaper than high-end barefoot shoes.

Many other traditional shoe styles are similar in having only a soft leather sole, so you can experiment with different patterns if you wish. Making is likely cheaper than buying here.

Look for the cheapest, bargain-rate shoes you can find. These usually have soft, flimsy soles and are flat inside. Check houseshoes in the same places; there are some that look much like ordinary shoes but with no actual support. I'm familiar with these for flat / no support options because I see them and rule them out while looking for footwear with grippy soles and arch support.

If you knit or crochet, a myriad of patterns become available, mostly for houseshoes or houseboots but I have seen a good variety of gorgeous sandal uppers.

It is also possible to buy just the shoe sole in a wide variety of stiffness, material, etc. Moccasin-grade leather soles will likely provide some protection from harsh surfaces without adding support. Houseshoe soles are typically synthetic and might work better if you expect to deal with wet ground.

>>But they look great!<<

They look totally awesome! :D

If you enjoyed it and found it feasible, I highly recommend looking up traditional shoe patterns. There are plenty online from cultures around the world. Plus options for decorating them.

Thanks for sharing, this was fun.

I found an old pair of the kind of moccasin boots we all wore in, like, the 90s -- pardon me, 'vintage' -- on Etsy & grabbed those, & they helped my feet SO MUCH over the winter. You can still get em from Minnetonka but they're a hunnert twenny bucks a pop these days. The shorter versions are still in the sixty-seventy range, & it's not like I have any shortage of leather kicking around.

My next planned project is a pair of Norse Viking-era turnshoes, & then I'll probably try some shorter moccasins.

I neither knit or crochet, but I did trade a pair of slippers I couldn't wear (they had arch support! which is good for everyone else's feet! except for mine!) for a pair one of my roommates had that are felted wool with just a flat rubber sole. They're WARM & I can wear them out in the rain as long as I don't stand in a puddle for any length of time. Those got me through the part of winter that I wasn't wearing the moccasins for.

Four layers of relatively light leather is plenty of sole for me, even if I'm climbing around on rocks & stuff. As long as it's not a'a, but I don't live in Hawai'i & wouldn't try walking on that stuff ANYWAY.

... now I'm gonna wind up making shoes from all over the world. I'm not complaining about that! I _am_ complaining that I'm probably not gonna live another couple hundred years so I can get really good at it, but, welp, here we are.

Thank you!

Yeah, wool felt is great if you're not allergic to it.

I look forward to your shoes of the world!

That's very cool! My feet are also quite particular, but making my own is not the solution as they need support, not flatness.

yeah I am INCREDIBLY lucky (weird, absolutely weird as HELL, but lucky) it's worked out like this

I like to say that "Everybody is someone else's weirdo, I happen to be several."

The only reason my medical weirdness doesn't get more attention is that all three of my roommates have WAY WAY MORE medical weirdness going on than I do.

... yes, that IS as terrifying as you think.

a project: sandals

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