One of our intrepid members got me ranting on about sewing soles by hand elsewhere. I thought I’d collect my current thoughts in a bit more organized fashion to share here.
Others please chime in to add and correct! I’ve improved a great deal on this since my first attempts, but still have a long way to go.
It really pays to mark holes.
The most important consistency for immediate eye appeal is probably regular stitch spacing, or a uniform distance from hole to hole. Then comes straightness, or uniform distance out from the featherline or in from the eventual trim line of the flange.
A fudge wheel, pricking wheel, pricking iron, or set of wing dividers can mark consistent stitch spacing, but will not guarantee straightness at the same time. With a fudge marking lines, rather than just points, you can follow with a compass or leathercraft edge creaser to emboss a line perpendicular to the fudge lines, and then pierce holes where that line and the fudge lines intersect.
I’d suggest doing this all looking or at least checking work looking straight down on the shoe, as if you were wearing it. The upper may tend to sag a bit further out over the featherline with wear, but consistency in whether and how much the outseam line extends beyond the silhouette of the forepart from the top gives the “face” of the shoe a straight rather than crooked smile.
Another quick one, learned the hard way: Don’t rely on a tool marking a fixed distance from the outside of the welt or outsole if you haven’t already blocked the flange consistently all the way around the shoe. A line so many millimeters from the edge won’t yield a consistent looking result if you have or will trim different amounts off the edges.
When it comes to actually making the holes consistently, I found it really pains to have relatively fine, pin-prick-like marks where the very tip of the square awl should go. Consistent marks plus pushing the awl in at a consistent angle to the flange leads makes more consistent holes. Even if you mark lines or use another method, it can pay to go over once more and prick each hole with a scratch or round stabbing awl, so long as the funnel-shaped divots it leaves aren’t so wide that it become unclear where exactly the point of the awl should go.
This is really just the usual advice on marking holes for neatness when saddle stitching by hand. The same techniques help saddlers, luggage makers, and leathercrafters. Shoemakers just have the added complication of clearance issues around featherlines, often requiring curved awls that need to be worked at irregular angles.
Don’t use a square awl like an inseaming awl.
The cutting edges of square awls run parallel to their long axes, like the edges of sabers or chef knives. The cutting edges of duckbill and diamond-point inseaming awls run perpendicular, across the long axis, like safety razor blades or wood chisels. As a result, each kind of awl needs to be moved differently to cut through material when it hits resistance.
It’s alright to wriggle inseaming awls, with a motion like turning a key or a doorknob, to help cut through a holdfast. That sweeps the perpendicular cutting edge side to side, slicing through the material. It will slightly widen the holes made, compared to just pushing the blade through. But it won’t risk cutting the holdfast too much in the up and down direction, where it’s short and liable to tear out.
Wriggling a square awl, by contrast, flops the point from side to side in a wider arc. This puts snapping stress on the point, which is risky. It also tends to ream out holes, making them more rectangular or even squaring than straight slits.
Ideally, your square awl is sharp: sharp enough to flip upside and cut paper with, like a scalpel or hobby knife blade, and sharp enough to push through any welt, midsole, and outsole. When it hits resistance, the motion that moves the material along the cutting edge is up-down, not side to side. The same motion as running a curved needle back and forth through a holdfast with its curve through the hole. Since reefing on the neck of the awl blade like a crowbar can snap it, often it’s best just to withdraw the blade slightly and push it forward again. It’s important to let the blade cut a curved path through the material, not just to avoid snapping at the curve, but to keep the cutting edge advancing.
Laying huge threads is tricky.
Just as in other freehand saddle stitching, consistent twist of the threads one around the other in the hole is important for consistent appearance. Shoemakers typically want to fill each hole with thread, not leave empty space for a dramatically slanted, Hermes-like appearance. But inconsistency will still show, giving lines an irregular, wavy or jagged look.
I’ve found that I really need to make inspection of each and every stitch part of my routine when working with thick, round, heavily waxed or coated threads during outseaming. Placing bristles or needles through in correct relative position, one high and one low, is even less reliable in producing threads twisted the way that I intend, especially when the ends and therefore loops to pull through for each stitch remain long, at the beginning of stitching.
I find it helps to keep a small scratch awl or stiletto handy to use as a laying tool, both to coax new stitches toward laying correctly and to correct inevitable mistakes. Sometimes threads just twist the wrong way as they’re pulled tight, and need to be loosened and rearranged to lay correctly.
Don’t hurt yourself.
I managed to aggravate my dominant elbow joint for several weeks by doing two large-size pairs in quick succession, without sufficient rest. Those doing many more pairs than I do might spend all week outseaming without discomfort, but my body—and more specifically my arm—clearly weren’t up for that. I wish I’d taken a day or so’s break between shoes of a pair, or even broken the work down into two or more sessions per shoe.
Other choices, like continuing regular weightlifting, probably lengthened my own injury. I suspect my awl blade also could have been sharper, especially toward the end of the second pair.