Merchant Alley

[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!

originally posted on Patreon; support me over there to see posts a week early!