I’ve made some new shoes! and of course I’m over the moon with how lovely (I think) they look… ! A few months ago, during one of our infrequent and thankfully very short lockdowns – and I’ll just say it again; I am SO GRATEFUL to live in Perth! – anyway, I decided to treat myself and bought a clog making kit from leather needle thread; this is the one that I bought here:
And this is the result! I was very happy with the quality of all the materials in this kit; the wooden soles are really nice, with a solid and very sturdy looking rubber undersold… the leather is a beautiful quality and of course those beautiful colours!
All the other bits and pieces are really beautiful quality… the little brass tacks are so pretty! I bought a tool kit too which was terrific and worked really well. I did think the brass buckles were just a tiny bit tarnished but not too bad and definitely not enough to detract from any other part of the clogs.
The only not-so-good thing was that the tiny little tins of glue supplied with the kit had both dried out, but fortunately I had my own glue that I’d purchased through Lisa of the Shoe Camaraderie from previous shoe-making adventures … I can appreciate that Esther of leather needle thread had gone to the effort though, even though the tins hadn’t worked.
Honestly I can understand it would be a pretty difficult thing to divvy up between kits and expect it NOT to dry up, I can even imagine how you could achieve it actually.
The other thing I did was to separately purchase some clear, water-based varnish, with which I varnished the soles before making my clogs… I’ve made several pairs of clogs already, for which I had carved the soles myself! and I believe they have lasted longer, stayed cleaner and been easier to wear too, thanks to varnishing the wooden soles.
Anyway I made another little “making-of” video, currently up on my YouTube channel… please enjoy!
In other news, I’m now on TikTok too, since apparently it is The Thing to do now… I’m pretty new over there and am still learning, and it takes me forever to make a tiny little video, even on top of making the thing! but hopefully I’ll get better at this too. My Tik Tok video for this is here.
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