The past couple days have been pretty busy.

It’s been rainy, then windy, then rainy and windy. It’s only a matter of time before it snows, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing!

So I’m approaching the halfway mark, and I think I’ve learned a pretty decent amount so far. I’m still not finished my first pair but they’re coming along really nicely.

Being the eager beaver I am, I came in on sunday and got started on a pair of high-heels since, you know, wearing regular shoes can get a bit ‘boring’ sometimes. am I right? so here’s a couple progress pics of them:

But nobody is in here to see high heels so here’s some pics of the good stuff.

I got started on constructing my shoe (since the uppers are all done and ready as you’ve already seen), so here we go from the start:

and yet again we start lasting. lets take a look!

so now that that’s out of the way, we take out the nails in the toe (which we’ll now refer to as toenails). so we rip out the toenails and last just the lining, which has been hiding underneath the uppers the whole time, just hangin out.

Now we can’t just leave it looking frail and half-naked like that, we we put on the toe-puff to give it a bit of strength and shape. So after some careful skiving and shaping of the toe-puff, on it goes.

and here’s what we have so far:

Now, we start using a rasp and a hammer to shape the toe. This is something you almost never see, but Marcell is very particular about his shoes, so he expects us to do the same. On a Last like this with such strong angles and corners, it makes even more of a difference. See for yourself. Shaped left half vs ugly right half:

Now that the toe is how we want it, we stretch the outer back over it and re-last, then hammer all our nails down. Ignoring the heel which looks like it got caught in a tornado…pretty good so far!

Now comes my first foray into doing some stitching. I figured my background in sewing would make things tolerable but I found myself cursing under my breath at every opportunity. It didn’t really help though.

But first we gotta wax our thread. I took the opportunity to lather my hands in baby powder. No reason, I just wanted to. But no, it’s not called baby powder, rather…

Now we get some wax and wax the thread.

Now we start welting. Can’t say I enjoy it but oh well.

Alas, I couldn’t do all of it in one day, so I’ll pick up tomorrow where I left off. Which is here:

More to come soon. ‘Later guys.