Hi everyone,
When I last posted, we were in the thick of things with snow falling…on top of our ice! We got 5-6″ of snow on top of the ice but today the sun came out and started melting some of the places so thick with ice and snow. The trees are still down, some limbs still dangling, and we still can’t tell anything about the fountain’s fate yet. It’s still buried under limbs and snow. Here are a few pictures I took Saturday morning from inside the house…
When we got home from church today, our power was off again… but fortunately I had put a pork roast in the crock pot and it was done when I checked it. We had to make the rest of lunch on the propane cook stove… the power came back on just as we finished lunch.
Not to be derailed by the weather outside, I decided to work on making my Ruby Red Fashion Friends “slip on” shoes the best they could be.
These were pretty nice and I was very proud of them…
… but I wasn’t happy with the backs of the shoes… instead of stitching the backs with a seam showing, I just kind of overlapped one side over the other and glued it in place and sometimes it was a bit tricky trying to get them to line up straight…
So, I tried something new… I decided to extend one side of my shoe pattern and make it wrap around the heel and look more smooth. Then I tapered the piece off and let it slope down into the shoe part that is stitched around the foot.
Here was my prototype…
Now I had to fix my paper pattern to fit what I had done. This was my pattern for the shoes I showed you Friday…
…and these were the patterns in progression to that point…
1st…
So I tried it and decided the front part needed to be scooped out just a little bit on the right side…
Every time you change the top part of the shoe, you have to modify the sole of the shoe… matching up holes… (one extra hole in the top piece because it is overlapped and counts as one hole)
If you think this has been a simple task… take a look at all these pieces… JUST FOR THE RUBY REDS! They are my trial and error and some patterns for keeps…I do need to sort them out again…
I found a couple pair of shoes in my box, from a few years ago… First my “Clodhoppers!”
… and then another pair of leather shoes, I obviously had no idea what I was doing…
So anyway, here are a few more pair I made this weekend. They are just plain for now because I am waiting for a new flower punch that has been delayed in the weather. It may come tomorrow or Tuesday…
This red pair…
…another red pair…
…and a gold pair made from a thicker leather…
So here are all the shoes I’ve made in about a week… Practice not only makes you better… it makes you faster. (Especially when you have a pattern that goes together just the way you want…
If you aren’t particularly interested in my doll shoes…how about some pictures of the birds at our feeder. I love watching them…
Well, that’s it for this shoemaker… time for bed…
See you tomorrow,
Blessings, Jeanne