…and here are the pieces.

I’m using a fairly stiff lining leather to compensate for the stretchy silver leather. The pattern might look a little strange, as in too short, around the tongue, but there’s a reason for that.

Lots of little holes.

More or less where the pieces will be.

Now I’ve got to sew all these pieces together…

Toe caps are finished, so much more to do…

I’ve clicked out the piece, now I need to add some broguing.

Ok, so first, please ignore the crappy construction of the uppers. I’ve got a million really good excuses about those. Hey, they’re only test fitters.

Moving on, the most obvious issue is with spreading of the topline at the lacing over the tongue, which is easily corrected with a build-up of leather on the cone of the last in order to make more room for the height of the foot.

The little toe of the customer is also being squished a little, so I’ll need a build-up on the right last there. Perhaps a small build-up on left last for the big toe too, and a little more support in the arches.

I’ve been building a custom WordPress theme this week for a web development client, so I haven’t been able to make it over to the shop to work on shoes.

Actually the project is more about using WordPress as a CMS than simply building a theme. After days of research this week, I’ve learned the two following things:

The Archive page can be passed a date with a specific category and it will only display posts from that category for that date. Try if for yourself. The Archive Widget though can’t be made to pass a category, and unfortunately there aren’t really any good flexible widgets for doing this either. I had hoped to find a snippet of code that would do this somewhere and put it place of the get_sidebar() call, but no luck (and it would take too long to code it myself / I’m too lazy to try). wp_get_archives can’t be passed a category either. This is all very strange because otherwise WordPress is surprisingly flexible.

WP_Query is the best friend that someone could have when trying to do some non-standard wordpress templating, such as creating a page to display posts belonging to only one category.

Ok, so all of this is really boring. There’s a reason that I don’t post about my web development work. I’m thinking though that a custom template for this blog might come out of all this research at some point. That’s sort of fun, right?

…and the test fitters are finished!

There were a few other steps before that, but nothing new, just simplified. A lot of work for something that will be worn for only 5 minutes. Perhaps I’ll document the process more with the next pair of fitters I’ll be making.

And now we wait… Won’t get to see how well these fit for a week or so.

Since these are only test fitters, I’m using some old fiber board for the insoles that I more or less saved from being thrown into a dumpster.

A view of the bottom of one of the shoes while lasting.

and the lasted test fitters.

Next step is to glue down the uppers to the insoles and then attach a cork soles to these.

I can already see that I’ll need to make some alterations to the pattern, but that’s one of the reasons for making a pair of test fitters.

More later… I’m exhausted… but I’m sure the students are even more so.