Over the years I have collected so many photos of shoes I planned to make someday – or maybe they had a feature that I wanted to try. It’s time to clean out the file cabinet, so I’m preserving a few on this blog post. In the first photo, I like the sage green center-seam …

The following was posted on the Shoemaking Forum Facebook page: I have a wonderful story for you. One guy ordered Lobb’s shoes from time to time and he only wanted one certain maker to make them. Once when he was ordering a new pair, the maker was on vacation (a old man on his 70′ …

If you’re a lover of all things leather, you will enjoy this blog. Since the text is in Japanese, there wasn’t anything that I could read, but that wasn’t important because the photos are spectacular. I scanned for footwear and had a thoroughly enjoyable evening, trying to imagine what the patterns for the unusual shoes …

The link to this video was on Shoemaker’s Forum recently. I have just begun to realize all the uses for this stitching technique. Thank you, Zacharias!

http://www.instructables.com/id/Felted-Shoelaces/ I’ve seen a lot of felt shoelaces, they’re always made from wool roving that is wet with soapy water, then rolled like you’re making a snake out of play-dough until they get long and skinny. They’re usually lumpy and irregular, at least when I’ve tried to make them. So the brilliance of chain-stitching, then …

Here’s a shot of fisher sandals I have made my granddaughter at the ages of six months, a year and one-half, and now two and one-half years. My daughter loves these sandals, she says they stay on her daughter’s feet, are easy to get on after the first few times, are flexible so Millie’s feet …

A student purchased one of the first copies of How to Make the Simplest Shoes: Nomocs, Lomocs and Fomocs (I made up these names) with your own two hands, and quickly made a pair of fomocs! She created a sling-back-style, and “butt-stitched” her upper to the partial fomoc edge with the “baseball stitch”. Fomocs are …

Here are medieval boots that have features that could be of interest to simple shoemakers. The boots shown below are “center-seam stitch-downs”. Stitch-downs are formed over shoe-shapes called “lasts”. The shape of these boots is similar to that of the center-seam pattern in How to Make Simple Shoes for Women, but the unique closure adds …

This video shows an ingenious Jamaican man making leather shoes with apparently natural crepe rubber soles – I’m puzzled by this, as natural crepe is quite expensive here, and I can’t find information online that productive rubber trees grow in Jamaica..Another mystery is “cheese”. Apparently “cheese” is natural rubber – so he’s making shoe cement …

Directions and patterns for making loop sandals are in both of my sandal-making books (“how to make simple sandals” and “how to make the simplest sandals”) I have envisioned makers selling their loop sandals from a little shack by the sea  – making the soles while customers watch (this is possible now because of the …