Two Pairs of Early Period Shoes

(Editing another post to fix the date I realised this one has been sitting in draft state for ages without actually getting published. I wrote this post in April '09)

These are shoes I made for two members of my household who were asked to join the royal household of our SCA king and queen. The king and queen are doing Merovingian-era, and wanted their household to have matching clothing and period shoes. This was one of those situations where I'd have liked to have taught the wearers how to make the shoes but they needed them in a hurry and it was quicker to make them myself than it would have been to teach people how to make them.

Both of these are based on examples in Stepping Through Time close in time to but not specifically Merovingian. I don't have any specific sources on early period shoes other than Willy Groenman-Van Waateringe's bit in STT.

All this happened just before a major event at the beginning of this year, meaning these were real rush jobs. I did both pairs, including fitting, in two and a bit evenings. The photographs were also rather rushed, taken while the shoes were still damp from turning, so the colour of the leather isn't necessarily true to life.

Fortunately, given the time constraints, they are quite simple shoes. Both are carbatines -- the sole and upper all being the same piece -- which made the patterning quite a lot easier. It also cut down on the required sewing a lot because there wasn't a sole seam to do. I'm not sure I could have done two pairs of shoes with separate soles in that time without skiving off work and foregoing a lot of sleep.

Rushed as they were there are patterning issues I would have fixed if I'd had more time. Mainly the toe on the ones with the pierced tounge is much too pointy, it should be a lot more rounded. The point of the heel on one of that pair is well off centre too, I fixed it on the second shoe but didn't have time to remake the first one on the fixed pattern. Those are fairly minor things though and I'm quite happy with them overall. Importantly the construction is sound and reasonably neat despite having been done in a hurry and it's nice to know I can get away with that. I can do very neat work, but the ability to do very neat work at a good speed is something that only comes with a lot of practice.

The leather is my standard 2.5 mm veg-tanned bovine shoulder. I was originally going to make these out of thinner, 1.5 mm, leather for fear the thicker stuff wouldn't take the rather drastic forming around the toe but the 1.5 mm leather I had turned out to be too thin and flimsy.

These shoes are held onto the legs with ties threading through the holes in the tounge. Originally they'd have been woven or braided, we ended up using some nice brocaded ribbon. I can't remember if we slotted the heel to thread the tape through or not.

The decoration was freehand scribed into damp leather with a scratch awl. The teardrop cutouts are a punched hole and two straight cuts to form the point.

The side seam of the toe is a round closed seam inside. The 'tail' lying over the vamp was tunnel-stitched down after the shoe was turned. I can't base this on anything other than that it seemed like the obvious way to do it but I'm happy with how it came out.

Still-wet shoes just turned. These were decorated before being closed. The decoration on one is darker than the other because I left it out in the sun after doing the work which darkened the exposed leather in the grooves. On the other I did the decoration after leaving the leather in the sun so the grooves are lighter than the grain surface. This will change over time as they're worn outdoors but I like the effect on the new shoe.

Long seam up the middle of the vamp. This is a whip-stitched butted seam as on the originals, not a round closed seam.

Here you can see the back seams and the inside of the vamp seam. These are slip-on shoes without a fastening. The slits at the sides allow the foot to get in and out.

A couple of tools

I just finished making these. They aren't based on anything in particular but nor are they glaringly modern. I recently got a gas torch and some refractory bricks which means I can do very very small scale forging, perfect for awl blades and small tools. I am very much a novice at both forging and woodturning but they came out Ok I think. Both are usable.

Eventually I want to try making some medieval punches for openwork shoes but that's probably going to require forge welding which the little torch won't do and mandrels I don't have yet.


The first is a pegging awl I need for a pair of 16th century shoes which have partially pegged lifts. It's driven with a hammer and makes a square hole through two layers of thick leather into which a slightly oversize wooden peg, roughly the same cross-section as a matchstick, is driven. Done right, it's incredibly secure. I've never done it before so I have no idea how well this will work out. I plan on experimenting once I've cut some pegs. I have some scraps of beech kicking around which is good peg wood.


This was the first blade I made, it was too small and badly heat treated and it snapped when I was driving the haft on.


The second is a grooving tool. It's entirely conjectural since I've never seen an example of a medieval or renaissance grooving tool but I have seen examples of cut grooves which are distinct from grooves that have been scratched or inscribed with an awl.

My first attempt at a grooving tool was a length of nail with a hole drilled through the end and then filed and polished at the tip to sharpen the rim of the hole, sort of like a very very small scorp. I used that on a couple of projects and it worked but I didn't think it was a particularly plausible construction for a medieval tool. If you're forging, a small round bar with a hole in the end is a lot harder than a bar with a flattened end folded over and sharpened so I made one like that. It seems to work quite well.

This is it from the back:


This is the blade before it got mounted, you can see the sharp edge:

Not a great photo, I need to rejig my lightbox so I can take photos straight down on things.

The hafts are turned from Ash, which I have lots of scraps of lying around after using it for tent poles. The ferrules are strips of brass bent and nailed in place. A similar ferrule was found in York and is pictured in Leather and Leatherworking in Anglo Scandinavian and Medieval York. The form of the mushroom-shaped haft is very approximately based on this haft from the SO-1 shipwreck, a late 16th century wreck in the Dutch Wadden Sea, on which the shoes I'm going to recreate were also found.

Late 14th Century Low Shoe

I realised the other day while I was looking over AdW's shoulder as she looked for something on here that I haven't posted anything about this pair of shoes yet. There has been a post about them sitting in draft for ages, I've just never finished it.

This is a major omission because this is a very significant pair in my development as a shoemaker, being the pair that marks the technical turning point in my shoemaking from using the diamond awls and unsupported work that caused such problems on my split pullstrap shoes to using smaller round awls, a board and wedge last, and a closing block, stirrup and footing block to hold the work. It was also a significant pair in that I had some very important learning experiences about the mechanics of how the fit of this and similar styles of shoes works and how the relationship between the shape of the last and the shape of the foot works to aid that fit but those are best saved for a separate post.

This was my next pair after the split-pullstrap shoes, making them my fifth pair. I spent the intervening time building better tools and learning how to use them as well as building small practice pieces with round-closed seams and top-bands and I think these are far superior both technically and aesthetically because of those better tools and the learnings from doing those test pieces.

I made these in mid-2007 to go with an outfit based on the effigy of Walter de Helyon, which I still don't have a decent photo of. It's what I'm wearing in my avatar photo though. The shoes are of type 40 according to Goubitz' typology, being a low shoe with a buckled instep fastening. Stylistically they are an extremely common type in the late 14th/early 15th century.

The leather is 2.5 mm veg-tanned bovine shoulder dyed with an iron-oxide dye. The top band is left un-dyed for a bit of interesting contrast. I'm not sure exactly what thickness the top-band leather is, I think around 1 mm. The buckles in the photos are temporary placeholders that have since been replaced with period pewter buckles.

The major pieces laid out, vamp, quarters and heel stiffener. Not shown are the latchets, the sole, the welt or the top band.

The scalloped edge on the instep opening was done with a punch I made by cutting a damaged holepunch in half and resharpening it. I used the same punch to cut the rounded ends of the opening slot. It worked very well and I now have a couple of different sizes.

The sole of the right shoe, note the very narrow wasited profile, this is what makes the fit work and provide arch support by pulling the upper in under the foot.

You can see the fit under the arch of the foot here. The shoe is not fastened in this picture. This sole was completely flat when it was on the last.

The vamp before it got all wrinkly from being worn.

The fit on the lateral side. Even without a fastening these stay on just fine.

Construction photos

The ends of whip stitching folded back and oversewn to hold them down. Far less lumpy than knots. One of these it the end of a line of stitches and the other is the start.

Random scale photograph of the reinforcing cord.

How not to finish the ends of a reinforcing cord. Knots are lumpy and uncomfortable. With the amount of overlap here they probably aren't even necessary. I did this differently on the second shoe.

Starting a new whip-stitching thread. I cut off the old thread flush and overstitched a couple of stitches with the new one. This has held up fine.

The end of the top band. Not a very good photograph but it should show how the top band was skvied and folded back on itself so as not to present any raw edges at the ends.

Top of the heel stiffener and the top band and reinforcing cord. I've heard people say you don't need a reinforcing cord if you also have a top band, which may well be true but I'm not 100% convinced and since it's all held down with the same whip stitch it's very minimal effort to add.

Top band and reinforcing cord going on. There are three threads in this photo. From right to left: the thread attaching the top band to the upper with a grain-flesh-edge-grain whip stitch; the reinforcing cord thread; and the thread whip-stitching the inner edge of the top band down with a grain-flesh-flesh-flesh whip stitch through the top band and upper. The curvy thread off to the top left is more reinforcing cord.

Closing the upper under the stirrup and over the closing block. These days I don't bother to pre-hole the left side of the seam because it takes more time than it saves. Closing seams should start at the top and run down into the sole seam, that way you don't have to worry about finishing them because the sole seam will oversew the ends and hold it all together. The closing block is actually a cork sanding block I had lying around because I hadn't gotten around to making a proper one back then. It worked Ok, but was a bit square. Now I have nice half-roundish ones made from ash.

Heel stiffener on, one side closed and one latchet attached. The heel stiffener was pasted in place with starch glue made from toasted cornflour. It wasn't terribly adhesive but it did impart really good stiffness to the finished shoe.

The short seam attaching the latchet. Note the bulging on the left. I was able to trim this back but I hadn't anticipated it. It is caused by the additional thickness of thread in a very short seam. This seam is only about 1.5 cm long.

More seams. The difference between these and the seams on the split-pullstrap shoes should be evident, though it is a lot more obvious in person than in photographs. These stitches are about half the size and the seam is much much tighter.

I couldn't quite get the to to "pop" all the way through. I think a slightly more rounded end (only 5 mm or so) to the sole would help here without making the end of the to obviously rounded, in fact by allowing it to pop right around it would probably come out more cleanly.

Knife Sheath

While I'm blogging about things that aren't shoes, this is a sheath I made about 18 months ago for a knife by Richard Van Dijk of Hoiho Knives. Richard's stock in trade are beautiful pattern-welded art knives but a couple of years ago he brought some simple medieval knives to an event, I bought this one and it is now one of my favourite knives.

The sheath isn't based on any particular extant example but is a collection of elements pulled together from different examples in Knives and Scabbards. The sheath is two layers of ~1 mm veg tanned yearling. The inner is grain-in the outer grain-out, as per medieval examples. There is no glue holding the two layers together. The inner layer was wet-formed over the knife and the outer layer was sewn damp over that.

The seam on the inner layer is a butted seam so it lays flat. The seam on the outer is a lipped seam saddle-stitched with the same thread I use for shoes then trimmed back and burnished down flat. 

This seems to be a fairly common way of doing things on medieval examples. I haven't seen one yet that had a butted seam up the back. There are two reasons for this I can think of the first is simply because this style of seam is far easier to pattern than a precisely butted seam. The second is that a lipped seam is far less likely to tear out under tension so the seam can be used to pull the outer layer tight and both form it to the inner layer and create enough tension to hold it in place without any glue or stitching between the two layers.

The decoration was done almost entirely with a scratch awl and I'm really happy with the way it came out. I scratched out the outline freehand and then used the point of the awl to rough up the background surfaces. The arms are my SCA arms. They were painted on using lampblack for the black and lead oxide carbonate for the white with a dilute hide-glue binder. It's not terribly neat but painting really isn't my strong suit. 

The one aspect of the decoration that really didn't work on this was the 'vine', which was the bit I didn't do with a scratch awl. Instead I used a freehand groover I made, with the idea that a wider line than the scratch awl was making would be good. The problem is it's much too deep compared to the rest of the decoration. In future I'll make a more blunt pointed scratch awl for this type of decoration. 

Scissors Case

This is really my shoe blog, but I'm not all shoes all the time (no, really!) . I do other things with leather too. This is a case I made for a pair of Historic Enterprises scissors.

The decoration is based on  a rabbit and a hound on different items in Knives and Scabbards. I liked them so I put them on this.

The body of the case is two layers, the inner grain-in and the outer grain-out. The inner layer was made over a wooden form, then the outer layer was made over the inner. 

The lid is a single layer that was made over a wooden form. Originally I made the lid in one piece with the outer of the body and cut it off, but that lid didn't work very well so I made a second one.

The decoration on the front was done flat, the back and sides were done after assembly. If I were doing this again I'd do all the decoration flat but it's been a long time since I've done something like this so I wanted to make sure it'd all fit.  The decoration on the back and sides is very simple, it's really just space-filling, which is consistent with medieval examples of this type of object. The animals were done freehand with a scratch awl, and backgrounded with a stamp made from a modified nail set. The stamps on the side are a lozenge stamp I made and the round dots on the back are another modified nail set. 

There is a little bit of hide glue between the layers of the body. It isn't necessary to hold them together tight stitching and friction between the flesh surfaces does that fine, it's just there to impart some stiffness to the body of the case. 

The next time I do one of these I'll make up separate forms for the inner and the outer and lid. That way I can build the outer and lid in one piece and make the decoration a bit more consistent. It would also make the process of gluing the inner in place a lot easier. The glue is useful for making the case hard and a bit more durable. 

I could water-harden the leather but that would compromise the decoration. Another option would be to water harden the inner layer over a form, cut it to length then cover it with  a decorated outer layer. The full length of the outer layer can't just be made over the inner because the inner is shorter. 

The strap is a piece of what appears to be alum-tawed sheep or goatskin. It certainly feels and handles a lot like the alum tawed goat I have in my stash and doesn't appear to be white-dyed chrome tanned leather. It was part of a bundle of leather that a workmate gave me so I'm pretty happy with it as a score.

The dye is modern oil-based black dye. I hate working with modern dyes but I'm having issues with iron-oxide dye stripping the tannins out of modern leather, which doesn't have nearly as much residual tannin in it as period leather would have done. The result is very brittle leather and a very damaged grain surface.   I haven't yet found a workable source of strong tannin to add to the dye so I'm holding off using it until I do. Period dyes are all well and good, but not at the expense of the actual leather. 

A picture I quite like

This is a picture of me sewing a reinforcing cord across the side seam of a type 40 shoe I was working on at Canterbury Faire in 2008. I'm sewing this with a real boar bristle, one of a very few I have and I have to say they are wonderful to work with. Not as convenient as nylon monofilament, but stiffer and I found much easier to sew with.


It's just a shame about the horrible handle on the awl. One day I'll replace all my awl handles with more accurately medieval ones. One day.

Notes for left-handers making thread

On a shoe and bootmakers forum I read someone was having trouble with their threads unwinding at the slightest provocation. They knew the thread and code were good because both of them had been used by other people before.

The picture they posted showed that the thread had been plied up using the opposite twist than would normally be used, which made me realise that a left-hander might end up doing the same thing if they were mirroring instructions written by/for right-handers.

When I ply up a thread I twist it up by rolling it down my right thigh, away from my hip towards my knee, with my right hand resulting in a clockwise twist if you look at the end of the thread. If you rolled the same ply down your left thigh with your left hand you'd end up with an anti-clockwise twist to the thread, which won't want to stay plied up because the resultant plied cord is an S/S twist instead of an S/Z twist and cords plied with the same twist as their strands won't stay plied.

If you are left-handed and you make threads on your left thigh, you need to break the thread by rolling it up your thigh, knee-to-hip, and ply the cord the same way.

When you ply up a cord the twist of the ply has to be the opposite of the twist of the component strands, in other words the twist you ply the cord with should be the same as the twist you use to break the individual strands.

The reason for this is that if you ply with the opposite rotation from which the strands were spun, then the fibres in the final cord lay straight. If you ply with the same twist you are placing additional twist on the already-spun fibres, which is then going to naturally want to untwist.

The difference between an S-twist and a Z-twist can be a bit hard to explain, and google wasn't vending with anything useful so I drew this picture:
[update: It has been pointed out to me by someone who knows far more about fibre work and spinning than I do (thanks CW and AdW) that this picture is backwards. What is labelled S should be Z and vice-versa. I will fix it as soon as possible.]

I'll follow this up with some pictures of S/Z and S/S plied cords that show the fibre directions which will hopefully clarify this explanation.