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Wednesday, November 9, 2011

Greyscale Ghoulia's ankle boots

The customized Ghoulia still needs an outfit and I decided to start with her shoes. As I'm thinking of making her an old-fashioned dress, I searched for old shoes designs and found this in one of my books about shoes. The only problem is the height of the heels. The old techniques for making shoes had limitations in that respect, but Ghoulia has high heel feet, so I had to sacrifice some authenticity.

Here are the parts for the shoes. They are all leather, except the two layers of cardboard under the insoles. The patterns for these were a bit trickier to make than normally and I started with discarded pieces of fabric, so I wouldn't waste any leather. The toe part is separate, because it would be hard to handle a seam going lengthwise there.

Next, I glued the front seams.

And then the back seam.

Because of the seams, it was important to position the uppers just right. To do this, you need to glue the flap at the back seam first and then a couple of places in the toe part. This keeps the upper in correct place while gluing the rest.

Then I made holes for the buttons in the flap and sewed the buttons to the other side. You need to make the holes first, put the shoe on the doll's foot, place the flap where it should be when the shoe is closed and then use a pen to mark the places for the buttons. The holes are the smallest my tool could make, probably 2 mm (or slightly smaller as I use that size when inserting 2 mm eyelets to leather and it's a bit tight). I used small beads as buttons and they suit the purpose well.

I made the heels the same way as the heels for Draculaura's boots, glued them in place and glued pieces of leather as outer soles.


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