How to Make Leather Shoes - Ballet Flats

I made this pair of leather shoes for my wife in the style of ballet flats, impart based on the Persian slippers that are found holding tobacco at the residence of Sherlock Holmes. The upper is made from kip leather with sheep leather piping; the liner is made from goat skin; the mid- and out-soles are made from 10 and 16 oz cow hide leather, respectively. All the leather for these shoes (except the sheep leather piping) are vegetable tanned leather. Project 23.

Pattern for women’s size 7.5-8 (delayed indefinitely) I am about half way finished digitizing the pattern. The pattern was made from my wife’s foot, so feel free to use it but I suspect you’ll need to make some adjustment to make it fit perfectly for your feet. I plan to do videos on how to draft a pattern based my foot, look for those videos in the future.

Vegetable tanned leather are more stiff than the common chrome tanned leather; but veggie tanned leather conforms to the wearer’s body much better than chrome tanned leather.

This pair of leather shoes is version 2.0 of a design that I had originally made in 2011. The prototype ballet flats where black w/o any piping. My wife really enjoyed wearing the prototype, in fact, she wore them so much that she wore a hole in them. So instead of fixing it I decided to make her a new pair, and fix some of the problems with the prototype.

I hope to do more leather shoe videos; I think it is an interesting subject. If you are interesting in leather shoe making then I look forward to sharing some of my projects with you.

As always follow me on twitter to get the most up-to-date happens in the studio. twitter.com/polywright

John Z Zhu
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 2016

Sorry for the following errors:
-"in2016" should be "in 2016"