I’ve seen had sev­eral peo­ple new to leather­work or shoe­mak­ing tell me they’ve bought an awl but they are hav­ing real trou­ble get­ting it to make holes prop­erly. Most times when I’ve asked them to show it to me, they’ve shown me one of these: It’s called a scratch awl and it’s used for mark­ing out patterns […]

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 […]

Apolo­gies to the var­i­ous peo­ple wait­ing on me to write things up on here. A mix­ture of busy­ness and bro­ken­ness has con­spired against much in the way of recre­ational typ­ing for a while, and what I could get done was going on the com­bat hand­book. It’s also meant I haven’t actu­ally done any­thing much for […]

This is a sec­tion of an arti­cle I wrote to go with a class I was asked to teach on an overview of period shoes. The actual arti­cle isn’t fin­ished yet because I’m clin­i­cally inca­pable of being con­cise, but this sec­tion is amenable to being chopped out and pasted in here. Analysing a Footwear Style­When analysing […]