I’ve decided to be a mature adult and not make a boot tea / booty joke.
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Did you completely flatten the cork from the ball to the toe or did you keep the shape of the last? I’ve seen people do it differently.
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Kept the curvature of the last
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Nice, clean fill.
Of course I ran out of thread for doing the outsole stitching after getting the flaps cut, etc. So have been awkwardly working on the heel and trying to avoid the thin leather on the front. Worst case scenario, I can add a thin sole protector.
Heel is pretty decently roughed in. Still need to attach and trim the lift.
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Nice! No rush.
Trying out some kangaroo lace laces. I like them, but they sure grip aggressively. Will make it difficult to quickly adjust, etc. Going narrower on the lace would probably help. These are 5mm wide. 3-4 might behave better.
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Lookin’ good!
You can sand and start again on edges if you like.
When i redid them this time, I think my edge iron was too hot. It seems like it burned the leather decently deep. I couldnt get it to clean up nice scraping with glass. Definitely running out of material to sand, so live and learn. I will do better next time.
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Doing natural edges is so hard. I was using buffed welt leather and It ended up looking like a gray color, I guess from my apron and just general dust. I couldn’t remove it with anything so I decided to make it a reddish brown edge. I still managed to burn the edge with my iron and seat wheel. I understand why a lot of makers prefer using a more ‘painted’ edge finish
I noticed some of the burning actually happened the second time, when I was melting the edge wax.
Using edge irons is pretty difficult too. If you use a single lip then it basically bevels the edge to an angle. Keeping the angle consistent across the entire welt is really hard. I found that rotating the shoe along something slick helps. Double lip irons leave an indent that adds an area without fudging, very classy look but kinda rare in the US.
I wish I had rewatched Mariano Crespo’s tutorial on finishing before I did this pair:
Finishing is one of those things master shoemakers are very secretive about. There is like a million different ways to do it. It makes me feel crazy trying to find a combination that works how I want.
Did you use edge wax or polish or anything to seal the edge? Modern edge wax kinda sucks for hand work.
BTW @kemitchell Mariano sadly passed away, I think his wiki needs to be updated.
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This is exactly what happened to me
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Also did you tape over the rubber when doing the finishing? I didn’t do it and it looks terrible and it’s really hard to remove the wax from there.
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That was part of what made me redo it. I had some really high gloss wax on there and the rubber looked like crap. When I went back, I was using beeswax which leaves a much more matte finish and didnt leave much in the way of residue on the rubber.
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