Sewing leather revisited - Making a sheath for my Frost Mora carving knife

Historical Note: I'm not sure who made the knife sheathes. There's no 'Scabbard Company' on the livery rolls in the 16th century. Possibly the Worshipful Company of Girdlers or they were a sub-group of the Leathersellers, who handled most of the miscellaneous leathergoods that made up Elizabethan life. It might even be the Cutlers, who were responsible for all the other bits and bobs associated with knives. Any way you cut it, there were a lot of knives in Elizabethan England. Every knife needs a sheath and mine are no different.

Looking at the projects that have been collecting dust, I think the shoes are probably the most annoying thing to have lingering overlong in the workshop. For one thing, the leather and lasts and tools take up a lot of room and for another, I just really need to get them done because I need a new pair of shoes. (Also, I hate leaving things half-finished.)

Unfortunately, while I haven't been completely idle since I parked this project in the driveway awhile back, I also haven't been doing any leatherworking. Cordwaining involves some pretty heavily-developed leatherworking skills, especially sewing, so I need to practice.

You might recall the costrel project, which is a study in heavy-construction sewing techniques. I also need a practice project that uses some of the more subtle stitches and techniques for closing the uppers of my new shoes.

As it happens, my preferred style of knife sheath uses the round stitch to close the seam up the back. And since that's a fiddly piece of business to learn and I'm in need of practice, methinks I hear a knife calling for a new leather home.

My favorite woodcarving knife has to be this Swedish blade made by Morakniv simply called "The Woodcarving 106". They sell on Amazon for about $25.00, which is a pretty good price for a knife you won't want to put down.

It's a strong little workhorse and can hold an edge like nobody's business. You couldn't ask more from a knife.

The problem: they come with a crappy plastic sheath. And that just sucks on a deeply aesthetic level.

The solution: make a new one, of course.

Parts List:

• A knife
• 2 poplar scraps slightly larger than the knife blade
• Shaping tools for wood (knives, spokeshaves, rasps, files, sandpaper... etc.)
• A piece of vegetable tanned leather large enough to wrap around the knife
• To make the pattern: See this post about patternmaking
• Wood glue
• Quality, long-staple linen thread
• Two large-eye long darning needles (or boar bristles if you can get them)
• beeswax
• sticky wax (if you have boar bristles to use)
• Stitch marking wheel or ruler
• curved awl 

A truly razor-sharp knife will eventually cut its way out of any all-leather sheath or die trying. If you make a standard sheath by sandwiching the blade between two pieces of leather as we used to do in Boy Scouts, the knife has an even easier time of it because it can just slice the stitches. Some leatherworkers use rivets instead of stitches and that's fine, but hardly traditional.

First, some woodworking...

I prefer wood cores (of course), so step one is to make a wooden house for the blade of the knife. I used a bit of poplar I had lying around, but any hardwood will do. We're going to use two pieces with a knife-shaped void between them to house the blade.

Cut two pieces of wood, slightly larger than your knife blade. Trace around the blade of the knife on one side of each piece of wood.

Use chisels and a router plane to remove the waste from one side (and one side only) leaving a void where your knife sits flush with the wood, like so.

 It doesn't have to be beautiful, but it needs to fit.

Why did I carve only one side of the sandwich? Because in any joinery project, it's unwise to leave a wedge (like a knife blade) sitting against a seam. You're just asking to get that seam split apart.

Glue your sandwich together using the glue of your choice and clamp it gently while it dries (or use rubber bands as I have done). 

You can use hide glue for the period touch. For knife sheaths, though, I prefer Tightbond III because it's waterproof and I'm more concerned about rust than turning out a period-perfect piece. This isn't really a reproduction of a period piece anyway, though the techniques are sound and were used during our time frame in this capacity.

Note that my pieces are rather thick. Partly that's because I'm using a scrap and partly it's because I wanted lots of room to maneuver when I got around to shaping the glued-up piece. 

Let it sit overnight to cure.

Make sure the knife sits securely in the void you carved out and then use spokeshaves, chisels, rasps, and handplanes to cut it down to the bare minimum of wood. I left roughly 1/8 inch of wood on every side of the knife blade.

Seal the wood. You can use an oil finishes for a period-appropriate sheath, or you can cheat and use polyurethane like I did. The next part of the process will expose this wood core to the damp and my woodworking often takes place out of doors in less-than-ideal conditions. It's your choice. 

Insert the knife into the wood sheath and wrap it in paper and masking tape as we did when making the pattern for the shoes last year. Note that the sheath goes about halfway up the hilt of the knife. That's on purpose. It helps protect the knife and will keep it from slipping out of the sheath quite so easily.

There's only one seam, up the back, and the edges should just meet. For more information on this style of patterning, see this post here: Wrapping Peasants - Pattern Drafting Part I and this post here: Drafting patterns for leatherworking.

Note #1: Remember to decide how you're going to attach it to your belt before you get to the cutting leather stage.

Note #2: If you want to incise, tool, or otherwise decorate your leather, do so before you begin sewing. I admit that I have at least once forgotten to do that. For tools like this one, I like mine a bit plain.

This is where we begin practicing our cordwaining in the guise of sheathmaking...

Boar Bristles and Closing Awls

Waxed Ends (skip if you don't have boar bristles/just want to use needles)

I'm going to sew this up using boar bristles instead of needles. This is the period-appropriate method of work for shoemakers and bookbinders. The sharp, flexible bristles are attached to the end using sticky wax and cleverness. I'm rubbish at it and need lots of practice, but Francis Classe is great at it and provided us with a great tutorial on how to go about it.  I do a lot of reinventing the wheel on this project, but I can't best Francis at something that he taught me, so if you want to go the bristle route, you should follow that link and learn to do it right.

Some modern shoemakers have good luck using heavy-test fishing line in lieu of the boar's bristle. If you don't have access to a boar or its bristles, there are those who swear by it. I've never tried it, though, so I trust your Google-fu to let you figure it out. I tried to find a link to a tutorial I could share but only found references to a dead site.

Your mileage may vary.

Why boar bristles and fishing line?

We're going to perform something called the "round stitch" which follows a curved path through the leather. In order to pull that off, you use a curved awl to create a tunnel through the leather from the top to the edge. Then, you need to be able to push your 'needle' through that tunnel. 

You can do this with long, slightly flexible needles like long darners and I've had decent luck doing so in the past, but a piece of sharp, flexible, keratin like a boar bristle or a similarly flexy bit of fishing line are a godsend and speed things up.

I'll get more into the boar bristles and waxed ends when we tackle the actual shoes. This is really just a test run...

Curved awls

The two outside awls are the same as in the previous photo. They are made from antiques, which I bought from the extra stash of a cordwainer friend of mine. You don't have to haunt antique stores and bug your shoemaking buddies for their tools, though. These closing awls are still sold new by some specialty retailers, or you can get by with that middle awl with the knurled piece for changing the blades. It was purchased new from Tandy Leather, just last year. Just make sure the cross-section is oval rather than round to prevent tearout.

Closing: The Round Stitch

Use your marking wheel (or a ruler, dividers, etcetera) to mark an even stitch distance all around the edge of your seam on both sides, 1/4 - 1/8 of an inch back from the edge. 

Make sure that the marks on each side a exactly parallel to one another.

My depth is wandering quite a bit here. You can see why I feel like I need the practice.

Use your curved awl to create a hole that angles from the mark made by your stitch marker curving toward and out the edge of the leather. The depth should be just a bit deeper than half the leather's thickness. THIS TAKES A BIT OF PRACTICE. I'd advise using some scraps to practice.

Too deep and your seam will pucker. Too shallow and you'll tear out.

Al Muckart -- a reenactor and craftsman who writes the Where Are the Elves? shoemaking blog -- created a tutorial that illustrates quite well how to do this. I've linked to it in the footnotes at the bottom of the post.

Wet the leather in warm water to make it a bit stretchy. You don't want to soak it too long or to use boiling water. This is not "cuirboulli", which would be too stiff for this particular purpose. Just hot tap water is fine and don't soak it for too long. (You just want it pliable and a bit stretchy, but don't want to leach all the collagen out of the leather.)

Roll the leather between towels to get the excess water out and then wrap it around your wooden core with the knife still in the sheath. Oil the blade and seal the wood and you should be fine for the amount of moisture we're talking about, but now you know why I sealed my wood. (Some sheath makers wrap the knife in plastic wrap, which isn't a bad idea.)

Either create your waxed ends or thread two flexible needles on either end of a piece of strong hemp or linen thread. I stipulated "long staple" which refers to the length of the fibers that were spun to create the thread. The longer the staple length, the stronger and more durable the resulting thread.

Working from both sides at once, sew back and forth across the gap. Note: people who make puppets and stuffed animals refer to as a "ladder stitch" while other leatherworkers may call it a "butt stitch". Shoemakers call it a round stitch, so we're going with that from now on.

The rest is stitching and letting the leather dry.

That open end is on purpose. It's traditional for to leave that little curled fishtail on Scandinavian knife sheathes.  I'm not sure if there's a practical purpose to it other than making the sewing easier because you don't have to ease the pattern around the point. It will be cut back a bit when I'm finished.

A lot of Nordic fishermen settled along the coast in Washington state, and I've seen antique fileting knives that have sheathes like this where the tip was cut to a little fishtail shape.  I'll just be slicing mine off at a pleasing (to me) angle.

Yes, that's blood on that bit of tissue you see above. Remember to respect sharp tools. And remember that the sharper the tool, the less damage it does when it does cut you. 

Now we just have to let the leather dry, then dye it to our desired color and finish it with a bit of wax and polish.

Further Reading:

1. Cordwhatnow? A layman's guide to shoemaking tools & terms School of the Renaissance Artisan, posted January, 2014
2. Basic Techniques of Construction (Including waxed ends and how to use them)
   by Francis Classe at his Raised Heels cordwaining blog
3. The Round Closing Seam in Shoemaking (PDF)
   by Al Muckart of the Where Are the Elves shoemaking blog

Occupational Hazards: My mother the shoemaker...

My mother was a nurse for most of my life, until she retired. Except at one point when I was a kid, out of frustration with some aspect of the nursing trade, she went to work in a local shoe factory. More than anything, I remember the smell of the glue on her clothing when she came home.

And you thought my grandfathers were my only link to the trades...

It's probably just as well that I did not know at the time about n-hexane polyneuropathy, an occupational disease endemic to these shoe factories brought on by exposure to the very glue that I remember so well. Thankfully, factory life didn't agree with her and she went back to nursing in pretty short order.

Nursing has its own hazards, just as sitting at a desk typing does, but occupational diseases are not a modern invention. Our repetitive strain disorders and bad backs and neuropathies born of the chemical age are nothing new. N-hexane polyneuropathy is just the modern equivalent of an 18th century disease known as 'shoemaker's colic'. Hatters were famously driven mad by the mercury they used, and so on and so forth...

Something we should probably talk about more often is the occupational hazards of the artisan life.

To get a bit nearer our period, let us wander off to Jamestown and take a gander at some scary-looking femurs that bear the marks of a lifetime of cobblers using their upper legs to pound on.  In the image at the right, you can get a glimpse inside a 16th century shoemaker's workshop from my old nemesis Jost Amman.

Note the way the two men in the foreground are working with the shoe on their thigh. The strap you can see holding the shoe in place, running under the heel of the bloke on the left is the shoemaker's stirrup I described last Sunday.

Image from the Jamestown.org

website's "Written in Bone: 

Forensic Files of the 17th 

Century Chesapeake" exhibit. 

Jost's guys are sewing, but hammers were also used to condense and work-harden leather, especially soles, and if you do that on your leg for a lifetime, your body is going to defend you from the damage. When you damage a bone, it repairs itself -- damage it enough repeatedly over a long enough period and your body will adapt, build up extra bone to protect itself from the next blow. Eventually, the layers of bone will build up and you end up with a sort of anvil attached to your femur.

Do me and yourself a favor: learn from their mistake.

It would make sense, in a way, for this to be more common for cobblers than cordwainers since sole repairs would've fallen to the cobbler. Though I should note that the Jamestown website doesn't draw a distinction between the two, and on the frontier there might not have been one.  On the muddy reaches of the Virginia coast, I would think that pounding hobnails into soles was a more common task than not.

A bone spur like that must've leant itself to one hell of a limp.

It's a cobbler's life, I guess.

Not all occupational markers are skeletal or so terribly painful. Bakers and blacksmiths have burns, which would theoretically heal and leave your skin all the more impervious to future burns. As I mentioned, the scars and bone spurs were the result of the body's attempts to protect itself.

On a side note, when I'm watching TV shows like NCIS or Bones, when they confidently describe the working lives of the men and women whose skeletons they're examining, I often wonder how hobbyists throw wrenches into the works on such occasions. I may be a writer, but I have several that might confuse a forensics team if I ever ended up on the table in an episode of Bones. My left incisor has been worn down years of cutting thread with it and I have a shoulder thing that's the result of a stint as a stockman at WalMart* in my youth preceded by a couple years in the pressroom of a local publisher. Compound that by all the adventures this project have led me on and I have to wonder what the CSI folks would make of my body.

That might seem a bit macabre, but ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

Food for thought anyway.

~ Scott

------
* You know that thing you hear about where Wally World comes to town and before you know it they're the only game in town? Yeah.

Cordwhatnow? A layman's guide to shoemaking tools and terms

Much to The Engineer's chagrin, my shoemaking project has quite overtaken the library. Thankfully, I've recently obtained a toolbox capable of organizing it all, so at least it's contained.

My leatherworking kit has been taken over by shoemaking. (Giant robot panda bear is optional equipment. Coffee is not.)

For whatever reason, shoemaking more than any other craft I've yet assayed has a language all its own. You don't have to speak the language in order to do this thing -- you never really do to be honest -- but you should know at least the basics if you want to communicate with other shoemakers out in the world or on the interwebs.

In the course of my research, I have assembled a short (and woefully incomplete) glossary in my notebooks of just the terms that pertain to what I plan to do. For an exhaustive list of shoemaking terms, I recommend this excellent one compiled by Marc Carlson: Glossary of Footwear Terminology.

For us, the following shall suffice:

Awl: For shoemakers, this is a dedicated metal bodkin with a handle, designed to poke holes in leather. They are very fine and very sharp and shaped specific to a task. Not to be confused with woodworking "scratch" awls or bookbinding awls, which are not suitable for most shoemaking tasks.

The wrong tools: From the top, A large scratch awl, a small scratch awl, and a 

bookbinding awl. These are not appropriate tools for sewing leather and will 

do more harm than good.

The correct tools: (from the top), an 1800's inseaming awl, a modern sewing awl with 

interchangeable blades, and another 1800's fine closing awl. Note their shape and how 

fine/sharp they are. These will not mangle your leather. Find them and use them.

Boot: A shoe with a cuff that extends up the leg as low as the ankle or as high as the upper thigh. The most common argument about footwear is how common were boots, how high, and under what circumstances were they worn and by whom.

Channel: A groove cut in the leather to protect a row of stitches that are laid at the bottom of the groove.

Clicking: Cutting out a pattern.

Clogs: Not just for Dutchmen any more. They never were, really; wooden shoes 

showed up anywhere there was mud or the potential for stuff falling on your toes.

Clog: A wooden-soled shoe with a leather upper, commonly worn as work boots are now, also worn over a lighter shoe as a type of patten. In particularly muddy or dangerous places, they could be made entirely out of wood with a carved-out inside for the foot.

Closing: A general term for sewing the leather pieces of the shoe together, usually edge-to-edge (a butted seam)

Closing Block: A half-round piece of wood used as a sort of sewing anvil, used to maintain the tension of leather that will be sewn on a curve. Usually held strapped to the showmaker's knee with a leather strap while sewing.

Cobbler: A shoe repairer, forbidden by English law from working with new leather, enforced by the guilds. (Do not call a shoemaker a cobbler.)

Cordwainer: A shoemaker, derived from 'Cordovan/Cordoban' leather, a specific durable leather named after a city in Spain from whence it was exported. Commonly a deep reddish color and used today to describe that color.

Counter: A reinforcing layer of leather sewn inside the shoe as a stiffener to prevent additional stretching or wear in a zone that would prone to that, such as the heel or instep.

Cowmouth: A broad-toed shoe that was common in the early-Tudor period (peaked during the reign of Henry VIII) commonly thought to have been brought to England, as so many early fashions were, from Germany.

Flesh-side: the side of the leather that was facing the animal.

Foot: A place to keep your shoes. A thing that usually hurts at the end of the day, often an indicator that your shoemaker doesn't know what he's doing.

Gouge/Plow: A tool used to cut away a broad channel of leather, sort of a combination of a skivving knife, a chisel, and a shovel.

Grain-side: The side of the leather that was facing the world when it was still attached to the critter that made it.

Tools for dealing with tacks: (from the back, left) Two english style shoemaker's 

hammers, a French shoemaker's hammer, a tack hammer made by a local 

blacksmith, pincers, and a tack-puller.

Hammer: Shoemaker's hammers are broadly split into English and French styles. They are used for a variety of purposes from forming/compressing leather to driving tacks (though I don't advise using one hammer for both)

Heel: Made of wood or stacked leather, shoe heels did not commonly appear until the very end of the Tudor era. It's believed that the advent of heeled designs was the complcating factor that lead to the abandonment of right/left (see: Crooked lasts) designs.

Sewing: From the top, anti-clockwise: Sticky wax for binding thread to bristle,
beeswax, long-fiber hemp thread.

Hemp: Alongside linen, hemp was probably the most common plant fiber in all of history. Spun from strands of the cannabis sativa plant it is strong and rot-resistant and historically widely used to sew all manner of leather goods as well as weaving durable cloth and spinning rope. These days a fiber most commonly used to make beaded jewelry by and for those who want to 'stick it to the man' in defiance of laws designed to curtail the plant's use as a psychotropic drug. Cultivars used for fiber production are absent or extremely low on the tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) that makes carbon-based life forms crave Twinkies when ingested.

Last: The foot-surrogate over which the shoe is formed.

Lasting: Stretching the leather over the wooden (usually) last and nailing it in place. Commonly divided (at least for our purposes) into crooked or straight lasts. Crooked lasts have a defined instep, dictating the right/life nature of the final shoe. A straight lasted shoe can be worn on either foot, but requires months of tortuous breaking in.

Latchet: A strap that holds the shoe in place, commonly with a button or tie. Latchets are the defining characteristic of a shoe by the same name, that became more common in the later Tudor period.

Mule: A backless slip-on shoe, worn in our period by all genders, but still common today in the women's section of the shoe store.

From the top: a gouge, a paring knife, an edger, a plow/plough, another paring knife.
Not Shown: Sharpening stones. All tools used in leatherworking should be razor-sharp

Paring knife: Before it was a common kitchen implement, the paring knife was used to clean up the edges by trimming away excess leather away from the shoe after the sole and upper were joined.

Patten: A protective wooden platform strapped to the foot to raise a walker out of the mud or at least to provide traction.

Peg: A wooden stake driven into a heel to bind and stabilize the stacked/laminated leather.

Pinking: Decorative cuts and holes sometimes cut into shoes and clothing in the Tudor period. It survives today as broguing.

Pump: A light turnshoe with a thin sole meant for wearing mostly indoors. Worn by all genders, but survives today in the women's section of the shoe store.

Quarter: The sides of the shoe extending around the back.

My favorite skivving knife was made by sharpening a butter knife I picked up at a 

thrift shop. Probably the sharpest knife in the drawer.

Skivving: Using a sharp blade on the flesh-side of the leather to thin the leather, especially in areas you want to sew through.

Sock: Not a sweatsock you wear on your foot, but a cloth liner sometimes sewn into a shoe which serves a similar purpose.

Sole: The bottom layers of the shoe, usually broken down by layer: insole, midsole, outsole, etcetera.

Stirrup: A leather strap that goes under the shoemaker's foot and up over the knee to hold secure a shoe and/or closing block while working with it.

Many skivving tools of modern design: From the back: A round knife, a 'potato 

peeler' skivving 'knife', and a modern razor skivving tool. The benefit of the
top two is you can change blades if they get dull. 

Trenchet: A multi-use shoemaker's knife and the symbol of the cordwainer's trade. They were often given elaborate blades and pokey bits until it seems like something stolen from a Klingon in the Star Trek universe, but quite real and very difficult to find these days. Survives today as the round knife, which is little better than half a trenchet.

Turning: When a shoe is sewn inside out so that the seaming is all on the inside and thus protected from wear.

Vamp: The part of the shoe that covers the toe, upper foot, and extends around the instep to meet the quarters on either side.

Welt: A strip of leather used to join the upper to the sole of the shoe.

If you're lucky, your shoemaking will also include one or both of the following:

Read whatever you want, but did I mention that coffee is not optional?

Coffee: In order to make shoes, the shoemaker must be awake and preferably alert.  The Elizabethan tradesman was woefully deficient in caffeine, but he had pretty much all the beer he cared to drink, so alertness while working might be my biggest anachronism.

Why do fools fall in love?

An Engineer: Actually, a mate who finds your tomfoolery charming rather than annoying, who is willing to put up with odd tools and odd looks from TSA agents. They don't have to be an engineer, but it helps. It's high time I acknowledge that this silliness would not be possibly without my lovely, talented, and above all patient mate, Kristin.

Wrapping Peasants, Part I: Drafting a pattern for shoes...

Where was I before my holiday travels got sucked into that polar vortex thingy we're all tired of hearing about? Oh! Right. We were making shoes. For this, we will have to backtrack a bit to October, when I was devoting time primarily to research while recovering from my mystery ailment and various ensuing nonsense...

Part One: In Which I Run Afoul of Congress

With a finished pair of lasts in hand, my next step in my shoemaking journey was to contact Francis Classe for advice. Our conversation ranged across the spectrum of tools and patterns. This inevitably led to a tussle with the US Postal Service, who waylaid my attempt to pay him for some tools, including some surprising ones: Boar bristles, which he offered to sell to me at a very reasonable price. If only I could get the check to him (Yes, a check; if you don't know by now I'm a bit of a Luddite, you haven't been paying attention.) which I finally sidestepped by at long last succumbing to the embrace of Paypal. . . God help me.

Two closing awls and a bundle of boar's bristles. I'm semi-convinced that

Francis raises wild boar in his back yard because he seems to have an 

inexhaustible supply of these bristles... 

While I was waiting for the USPS to get their appointed rounds out of their dark of night (ahem), I headed to the library to seek out a copy of "Stepping Through Time: Archaeological Footwear from Prehistoric Times until 1800" by Olaf Goubitz.  It is essentially the book on the subject. Goubitz, who died in 2007, was a Dutch archaeologist who dedicated his life to the conservation and study of historical leather artifacts, which led to books and articles like Stepping Through Time... and Purses in Pieces. His books are full of tireless scholarship and hand-drawn patterns and replications of shoes from shipwrecks archaeological digs throughout Europe.

Thanks to his tireless efforts, I am able to approach this part of my project with more confidence that I'm approaching the subject in an historically-sound manner than I have at any other time in the past 13 months.

I'll do my best not to screw it up.

Thanks to the magic of Inter-Library Loan, in short order, I found myself in possession the People's Copy of this seminal work. By which I mean that The Library of Congress was apparently the only copy available, which led to me being the guardian of this important book, as the United States government went on hiatus almost immediately after I picked it up.

Needless to say while I was the Keeper of Congress's Preeminent Pre-modern Shoemaking Text, I took copious notes and chatted a bit more with Francis before settling on a pattern and a plan.

We'll gloss over the fact that when I returned the book after my 2-week guardianship, the librarian finally opened the envelope taped to it and discovered an admonition that I was Not To Take This Book Out of the Reading Room. She and I agreed that our legislators were far too busy arguing to care about my minor flouting of congressional mandate.

Either that or I've doomed my soul to Congressional Library Hell...

Normally this would be my idea of heaven... unless the shelves were unalphabetized.

And I had to re-shelve the books... (shudder)

image source: "15 Gorgeous Photos Of the Old Cincinnati Library" via Buzzfeed

Part II: On the Drafting of Patterns

As a painter, I've always been fond of the curious and somewhat controversial pastoral paintings of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Especially the detail on the costumes, customs, and clodhoppers. These are the feet of two bagpipe playing peasants in the painting 'Peasant Wedding' clad in some charmingly simple-looking shoes.

Detail from The Peasant Wedding c. 1566 by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Image source: Wikipedia

As I mentioned, Bruegel's bucolic depictions of peasant life are somewhat controversial in many circles, so I try not to trust them if I cannot back them up from more conventionally reliable sources. Which is where our old friend Goubitz comes in.

Among the shoes he documented from digs in the Netherlands were these, which I re-drew from his book. Handily, he provided a schematic of the pattern pieces as well, as you can see below.

This is where we get to the pattern drafting part of our program.

Note: I am basing my drafting methods here on years of experience drafting patterns for clothing, further informed by an article contained in the book Handmade Shoes for Men by Laszlo Vass & Magda Molnar.

This is something we'll re-visit at least twice more after we're finished with the shoes, and it's an important aspect of everything we do as we clothe our renaissance working man (or woman) from toe to head. At each level of dress, we will find ourselves wrapping parts of a body in paper and imagining flat drawings from 450 years ago into three dimensions.

Which entails a lot of paper and a helper. When drafting patterns (or as I like to think of it: "Wrapping peasants") it is best to work with a friend.  Which makes it especially appropriate since it was the week of Christmas when I started laying paper over my shoe lasts and making with the Scotch Tape and sharpies.

Once I had the shoes wrapped in paper, I approximated the seam lines from Goubitz's drawing on my new three-dimensional model, guessing in places where and how I would compensate for the contours of the wooden foot, marking out how the vamp and sides come together.

Then I used a shop knife to cut along the seam lines, cutting the paper away from the last and laying them out flat to check that they approximate the pieces that Goubitz drew for his book. 

From paper to leather to shoes... simple enough, right? We can only hope.

More later,

- Scott

Waiting for the other shoe to drop...

Some things I learned today:

1. Wooden shoes are really quite difficult to walk in, 
2. The Dutch call them 'Klompen' from which we apparently derive the onomatopoeiac word my dad used to describe how I walked across a room. (ClompClompClompClomp...)
3. Splinters. Ouch!
4. I have no idea how anyone dances in these silly things. 
5. "Onomatopoetic" is a real word but sadly doesn't refer to extremely noisy poetry, which is just terrible and wrong in my opinion.

While we're making lasts and getting our joinery act together, let's chat a bit about workplace safety. My new shoes will be many things, but steel toed is not one of them. For safety's sake, let us consider other options in the foot-protection department. Clogs. Or you might call them klompen, sabot, or those whimsical tripod albarcas of Spain. Whatever you call them, wooden shoes are everywhere. (And not just in Europe, but the world. Japan, China, and Korea all have wooden shoe traditions.) All across the the planet, people have spent a large part of the last few millenia using wood to protect their feet.

The fens of Europe were much worse in the early modern period before landowners spent a few centuries draining the wetlands and building dikes and whatnot. So mostly, the wearers of all these clogs were trying to stay out of the mud. However, it's worth noting that I am not exagerrating, apparently the European Union has granted 'safety shoe' status to the traditional clogs.

I wouldn't want to drop an anvil on my foot even if I am wearing a nice wooden clog, but then I wouldn't want to drop an anvil on my foot when I'm wearing steel toed boots either, so... yeah.

Anyway, clogs like the ones I'm wearing above (made, incidentally, in Holland, Michigan) are most often identified with the dutch, but wherever there was mud and offal in the offing, there was wood on someone's feet.

Remarkably, even if these were strictly Dutch shoes (file the point toes off and they'd be right at home anywhere in Europe), it wouldn't matter to us. Why? Well, remember when we were brewing beer? The influx of immigrants and refugees to England made London a bustling and cosmopolitan city. The peoples of the Low Countries (modern day Belgium and the Netherlands) fled religious persecution and Spanish rule in their homeland and brought with them their beer and their pottery and set up shop wherever they could find a bit of space. So even if they hadn't found people wearing clogs and pattens, they'd have introduced them when they got there.

The Worshipful Company of Pattenmakers won't be incorporated until the mid 17th century, so they technically fall outside my project. Which is why we are not going to make a pair. (That and I still haven't found one of those pesky stock knives I was talking about...) Nevertheless, they were around and they were indeed making pattens and overshoes to navigate the muddy streets of 16th century London.

Pattens we will make once we have shoes to strap them to. It gets pretty muddy here in Washington so if I hope to wear these shoes and have them last for more than a season, I'll need to get myself up out of the mud.  To do this, I will strap some wood and leather overshoes to my shoes using the traditional (and blessedly easy-to-come-by) wood of the alder tree.

Honestly, I'd like to see more clogs and pattens worn at reenactment events anyway. Maybe we can start a trend!

Dutch (again) pattens found in an archeological site.
Creative Commons licensed via Wikimedia Commons

We'll talk more specifics about the making and design of pattens when I'm making them. In the mean time, let's take a closer look at my wooden shoes, just for fun...

The Dutch-style clogs on my feet are visibly almost identical to the shoes worn in the muddy byways of the Low Countries since the 14th century. Mine, however, were carved from poplar by an ingenious combination of lathes and very clever industrial tools that have been around virtually unchanged since the 1920's.  You can see them in action here if you are curious.

Our pattenmakers and cloggers of the 16th century had no such access to mechanized luxury. They turned them out on at a time from an alder log using a stock knife and a spoon-bit drill almost exactly as you'll see in this video.

Neat stuff!

More later, as always...

~ Scott

The Last Last Post

For the record: I'm won't spend quite this many posts for the second last. However, on advice from Francis, I did go back out to the workbench and spent some more time zeroing in on the correct form of my last. He advised that I raise the sole about a 1/4 inch, sloping from the ball of the foot to the heel. This isn't to accommodate a heel so much as to accommodate the shape of the human foot.

This was done mostly with hand tools this time: the pattern maker's rasp and as I neared my final desired measurements, a spokeshave. I will sand it to remove most of the toolmakrs before putting a finish on it and moving on to the next one.

In the meantime, we're going to shift over and visit the Joiner's shop.  Stay tuned!

~ Scott

A bit of heel lift demonstrated by putting the heel on a handy speed square.

The less-flattened sole of the shoe.

 

...and Lasts, and Lasts, and Lasts

So apparently when Francis Class told me that the problem with modern/vintage lasts is that they're not 'flat' he meant 'didn't have a heel' rather than 'as a board'. (So to speak.)

You see, it didn't quite sink in that, unlike maskmaking, when you take the last out of the shoe, you don't cut it out. So there needs to be a bit of wiggle room in the form of a toe and heel rise to allow you to slip the last out of the shoe without stretching and distorting it in the effort.

That makes perfect sense.

Thankfully, in the conversation I had with Francis last night, it turned out I'm not the first aspiring shoemaker to grab a piece of scrap pine and try to turn it into a last. He shared this link to the shoemaking blog Where Are the Elves? Adventures in Historical Shoemaking. This guy turned up an historical last to copy. It's a 'straight last' and I'm making a 'crooked last' but more on that another time.

Also, the sole is generally a bit smaller than the shadow of the shoe. So my last needed to look even less like a shoe and even more like a foot.

I can do that.

Tonight after work I grabbed my patternmaker's rasp (Hand tools FTW!) and spent some time with my last in a vise, re-shaping the sole and putting more of a narrow waist on the new last.

I might have to shape it a bit more but I didn't want to overdo it. It's easier to take off too little than to put too much back. . . or something like that.

Worshipful Company of Cordwainers Part I: Something that lasts...

Don't call them 'Cobblers'. A cordwainer is a shoemaker, a cobbler was actually forbidden by statute from working with new leather. His purview was restricted to repairing a cordwainer's work after it failed. The Worshipful Company of Cordwainers controlled all aspects of the manufacture of new shoes.

Whence came the name? For that, we go straight to the horse's mouth, as usual...

"Those who worked with the finest leather were called Cordwainers because their material came from Cordoba in Spain. They developed a soft, durable goatskin leather known as Cordwain – the very finest leather available – importation of which contributed to the growing prosperity of London. Over a period of time, those who processed the leather formed their own guilds. The shoemakers, however, retained the name of 'Cordwainer'." - From their site: http://www.cordwainers.org

Yesterday I said I knew nothing about shoemaking going in. This is true, though I've done an extensive amount of leatherworking so "nothing" might be a bit of a stretch. My favorite form of leatherworking, in fact, is making leather Commedia Del Arte masks like the one you see below. 

Much like shoe making, masks are made with the leather worked wet and formed over a carved wooden matrix. (If you are interested in maskmaking, click here for a full tutorial I wrote last year). So the first step in making either mask or shoes isn't leather, it is carving wood.

And carving wood is something I understand completely.

First things first, I had a chat via email with Francis Classe, historical cordwainer extraordinaire and all around nice guy. He's been very helpful and supportive all along, providing not only advice, but photos and links to things he'd written as well as books of historical shoe making. Francis works with modern wooden lasts that he modifies for a period shape.

I like woodworking and I have some carving tools that haven't been taken for a spin in far too long, so we're going to make our own. (This is not to be confused with the fact that I have a size twelve foot and couldn't easily find a modern last to modify. Nope! Not at all.)

Seriously though, I shake my fist as these hobbit feet on a regular basis.

Seriously, I had to get out the big sketchbook to even trace around them. I know people with larger feet than mine and I tell you now I don't want to make shoes for any of them.

The lastmakers weren't a proper guild in their own right, so I'll be going through this pretty fast and hopefully we'll get it in one. Essentially I'll be using a lifetime of carving experience to sculpt something approximating my foot. Then I'll do it again with the other foot.

Deviation(s) from Period Techniques: Near as I can tell, the standard practice for last makers in the period is much the same as now. Hardwoods (preferably beech) are cut to a rough shape using something called a 'stock knife' which aren't easily obtained in the United States. A stock knife is a large blade with a handle on one end and a hook on the other. I'll append a video at the bottom of this post of an experienced clogmaker using one.

The hook is secured to an eyebolt in the table as a fulcrum to form a 2nd class lever. I couldn't find one and don't have the werewithal to make one, also I'll be using scraps of pine since this doesn't have to survive the ages, just the one project. If I like doing this and want to do it again, I'll make another out of a hardwood. In the meantime: pine.

Because my feet are deep and wide, I glued up a some chunks of 2 x 6 I had lying around and transferred my traced outline of my foot to the wood, trying to avoid knots and grain funkiness. Or at least use the grain funkiness to my advantage.

Step two of any carving project is to remove as much waste material as possible. The fastest and cleanest way to do this would be to cut it away with a band saw, but I don't own one. So the second best chance is to cut to the line and chop away the waste with a combination of chisels and coping saws.

It's hard to do this and take pictures at the same time and The Engineer was grouting the kitchen tiles, so forgive me if these look a bit staged. It's only because my hands aren't in the shot.

Having pared away as much of the waste as possible, only resorting to the chopsaw for the bit that crosses the knot at the little toe.  Chisels tend to glance off of knots or chunk them out completely to the detriment of carving as a whole.  A real last maker would choose a clear piece of hardwood, as I said, but we're working with what we have.

Now, more cuts to make the waste as small as possible before removing it with a smaller chisel...

Working in all three dimensions means more cuts and switching through a series of chisels and working top and bottom.  According to Francis, unlike modern lasts, period lasts tended to be flat-bottomed since heels hadn't really become a Thing yet.

At this point, it's time to switch to a gouge because it's easier to create and follow curves with a gouge than it is with a bench chisel...

Most of the waste is removed, time to get to the final shaping.

This is where I encountered a very modern conundrum. Because lastmaking is ancillary to the actual project and just this one had already eaten the heart out of a day, I was faced with another few hours of paring away at the last with a succession of knives and rasps, or I could use a machine.

My conscience got the better of me. In the end, I rasped away most of it until I's achieved something close the final shape and was starting to lose the light. Then I took it into the garage and chucked a drum sander into the drill press and finished the final shaping and sanding in one.

So... speed may kill, but it does save you from wasting more time than you have to.

Next: Do you know your left from your right? Did the Elizabethans?

~ Scott

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Resources:

"Footwear of the Middle Ages" by Marc Carlson (Website) How historical shoes were made from the middle ages through the Tudors, working from primary sources and personal experience. Great site, lots of information.

"Handmade Shoes for Men" by Laszlo Vass and Magda Molnar (Book) Modern shoe making and some inaccurate history, but valuable information on measuring feet and fitting shoes.

"Stepping Through Time: Archeological Footwear from Prehistoric Times Until 1800" by Olaf Goubitz (Book) Just what it says on the tin. Francis swears by this book. I haven't acquired a copy yet, but I'm working on it.

"Chopine, Zoccolo, and Other Raised and High Heel Construction" by Francis Classe (Website) I hesitate to risk the pun, but Francis is a class act and a generous scholar of historical footwear and how it was made. Visit his site and his blog to see this done right, thoroughly, and well.