Polymer clay soles with stiletto heels

The latest video shows how to make soles using patterns with polymer clay. It is actually one of the easiest ways of making soles I have figured out so far, if you don't count the trouble of making the card stock supports. Then again, you can reuse those and make more than one pair of soles before using them for shoe soles as well.


Here are the finished shoes, which are also shown at the end of the video.

Heels for Miss Piggy's boots

I finished the boots I was making for Miss Piggy. They were only missing the heels and the video below shows how I made them. It's a long one, because I didn't do the usual cuts for when I made the same steps for the other shoe.

Making a master for a mould

I'm still making resin castings as 500 ml of resin is a lot for casting such small pieces. Finding out that latex moulds can be used with resin was really great, because I can make moulds for casting just one pair. You can't really use a special design, like the one for Monster High Nefera in the picture below, for a lot of shoes.

As you can see, the parts used for the master are really simple, just wooden and plastic beads, a round wooden stick (for keeping the heel parts together) and card stock. The main things are that the master lasts long enough to make the mould and that there are no openings between the parts for latex to get into (two coats of sealer will take care of that).

In the next picture, the master is attached to a base with clear mounting tape and two coats of sealer have been applied. This is for making the latex mould, which has been described in previous posts.

Here you can see the finished mould and the pair of castings. The part of the mould between the heel and sole needed to be cut a bit to remove the castings and turn the mould. Those parts of the sole were so close to each other that too much latex collected there when making the mould.

I also made a couple of pairs of soles for Miss Piggy. The masters for both designs were made of card stock (sole) and wood (heel). The Barbie wedge sole is included to show the scale.

With such a long and thin sole, it was necessary to have some extra support during the casting process. I removed the heel from the master and used the curved sole under the latex mould to ensure that the mould would keep the correct shape.

More plastic

I decided to try the transparent plastic in Piggy's shoes. As usual, first I needed the insoles.

I glued fabric on them.

And turned the edges under the soles.

I'm usually not particular about the placement of patterns in insoles, but this time I made sure the they would be identical.

Then I cut wide straps from plastic, added strips of stickers, and applied glossy sealer to stop the stickers from falling off.

I made holes at the end of the straps as before and used double-sided tape to keep the straps in place before gluing.

I used one pair of the polymer clay heels just made. I applied one coat of glossy sealer, let it dry, added stickers, and then applied more sealer. The purpose of the first coat of sealer was to make the surface less porous and help the stickers stay in place.

I actually applied the last coat of sealer after assembling the shoes and hung the shoes to dry. The result is always neater, if you can apply the sealer to all necessary surfaces (sides, back, front, bottom) at once, but that means you need to figure out a way to place the heels/shoes to dry in a way that the wet surfaces won't touch anything.

Here are the shoes on 16" Miss Piggy.

For the previous post on using transparent plastic, see here.

Making modeling clay heels

My main problem with modeling clay is that I cannot make two identical pieces without a pattern or mold. So, I have solved the problem of making heels by using a cardboard mold.

This time I was making heels for 16" Miss Piggy's shoes. The photo below shows the cardboard insole with an empty mold for the heel.

The hardest part is making the pattern for the mold. You can see the basic form below, but it is very much trial and error. Once you've got the pattern right, draw the required number of them on cardboard, fold the front parts as shown, and cut out the pieces. You can make the folds after cutting, but I find this order easier.

Curve the back and sides of the heels using a suitable round object, for example, a marker pen.Then glue the front as shown. The result is the neatest, if the lower flap (the one that goes inside, against the modeling clay) covers the entire width of the heel front. If it doesn't, you'll get a visible seam in the modeling clay (see the last photo of this blog post).

When the glue is dry, pack the molds full of modeling clay. Press it tightly to avoid any gaps, but be careful, so you won't crush the mold. When the mold is full, use a craft knife to cut off any modeling clay that exceeds the top or bottom of the mold, and make sure the form of the heel is the way you want it.

Bake the heels in the oven according to the instructions given in the packaging of the modeling clay you're using. After getting them out of the oven, remove the cardboard immediately (as soon as you can handle the hot pieces). If you let the pieces cool down, the cardboard will be a lot harder to remove. If you're going to cover the heels with fabric, leather, etc., you can also leave the cardboard in place (especially, if you have used leftover pieces of clay of various colors and want to make sure that won't show through the material used for covering the heels).

Here are the finished heels for Miss Piggy.

The top of the heel may be convex even when you have cut it before baking. If that is the case, just use a craft knife to remove any extra material. This has the added benefit that glue will hold better, if the surface is cut or sanded after baking.

Shoes for 16" Miss Piggy

The basis for these shoes were plaster castings I had made some time ago. I glued the platform toe parts to cardboard soles that had 3 layers of cardboard glued in shape.

Next, I covered the sides of the toe parts with leather and filled gaps with leftover pieces to make sure that the outer soles would stay even when glued in place.

Then I covered the plaster casting heels with leather and glued them in place. Usually the heels are the last part to be glued, but I wanted to try a different method this time.

Then I covered with leather the edges that still had cardboard visible. The metal strip you can see in the photo is there to provide extra support to keep the arch in correct form. I don't use that a lot, but Piggy weighs more than smaller dolls, so some additional strength is a good idea.

For the closing mechanism I decided to try hook and eye, which turned out to be a bad idea as you can see later.

The straps are made of leather and the decorations are actually sticker strips with transparent background. Those are really easy to use for something like this. I covered the strips with glossy sealer just to be sure that nothing will fall off later.

The insoles are made of cardboard and covered with leather leaving some extra around the edges. I cut off the extra where the straps went, but in other places I turned it under the soles.

Here you can see the insoles with some sections already turned under.

The problem with hook and eye was that the end of the strap pointed to the side instead of going along the side of the foot. As I had already glued the pieces in place, I decided to fix this by cutting the hooks, pressing them flat and gluing the straps to the leather strips that held the hooks. So the result is no closing mechanism at all, but fortunately Miss Piggy's feet are different from most other dolls' feet and even shoes with fixed straps placed this high will be fine.

Finally, here are the finished shoes. The outer soles are finished with pieces of dark brown leather.

Platform sandals for Miss Piggy

As I was looking through some fashion magazines from this year and cutting shoe pictures for later reference, I got several new ideas. One of them came from this picture of a Prada shoe. I rarely make replicas, so the basic construction is from this, but I used black leather and the fabric I used for Monster High doll shoes earlier.

I started by cutting the toe parts from cork. I used leftover pieces from the cork board I used for the dollhouse front wall, so it was too coarse to be used as such, but was fine for this as it was going to be covered in thick leather. The heels are cut from a round wooden stick. Getting the right angle on the top was tricky as a mitre box is meant for cutting in 45 degree angle, which would have been too steep. So, I had to keep the piece of wood in angle in the mitre box during sawing.

I covered the pieces with leather. The pieces of leather in the top and bottom of the cork parts are there to help keep the soles even.

The insoles have two layers of cardboard and one of leather. The outer soles have three layers of cardboard with leather strips glued to the sides and leftover pieces glued to the top and bottom. The cardboard in the insoles will take care of small unevenness, but without the leftover pieces in the middle of the outer soles, the center part of the insoles would be lower than the edges when the soles are glued together.

The straps are glued in place here. They consist of leather strips covered with fabric (the fabric was too thin to use alone). The leather parts do not go under the insoles, just the fabric. Leather is too thick and would make the insoles bumpy.

Here are the parts so far. The parts that go behind the heel are made of leather and one layer of cardboard. The reason for using cardboard is that it keeps the parts in correct shape when you glue the fabric in place.

Next, I glued the cork parts to the outer soles and covered the heel parts with fabric. The light colored leather pieces shown beside them are the innermost pieces that will cover the flaps of glued fabric.

This closeup shows the construction better. The ankle straps are also in place here and so are the beads that will be used for closing them. The ends of the straps and the thread used to attach the beads will all be hidden under the leather pieces.

Here is the upper part of the right shoe almost finished.

The same in a side view after gluing the outer sole in place.

The loops for closing the ankle straps are made of thin rubber band and glued in place.

Almost finished. The parts in the middle are the leather pieces to be glued on the bottom of the outer soles to cover them.

The final step was to glue the heels in place. Here are the finished shoes.

And finally, the shoes on Miss Piggy's feet.

Old-fashioned boots

I've been planning on making some kind of old-fashioned boots for some doll. As Miss Piggy has so large feet, she was ideal for this.

First, here are the soles made of two layers of cardboard glued together to form the correct shape. The small pieces are made of air-drying modeling clay and are to be glued to the soles to get the correct form for the toe part.


I decided to use thick fabric for these boots. The edges of the fabric are again treated with Fray Stop. The part shown in the middle is actually same shape and size as I used for the red boots.


The heels are plaster castings. This is the shape of heel found in many old shoes. It probably has something to do with the structure of the heel as old shoes often have stacked heels and those tend to be quite thick. Of course in this case, the shape could be anything, although plaster isn't practical for very thin parts. As these heels will be covered in fabric, plaster is fine for them.


Here you can see one part of the upper glued in place and the back seam of the two other parts glued as well. The heel is covered using same fabric, glued in place using PVA glue.


Just testing how the heel will look once in place.


The hardest part is done now. When using the same fabric on the heels, make sure the parts of the upper turned under the sole cover the edges properly as the outer sole won't extend all the way back, but will stop in front of the heel.


This time I didn't use eyelets for the laces, but pieces of trimming that double as decorations.


Here are a couple of pictures of the finished boots.