At the upcoming Canterbury Faire I am going to be teaching a class on making round closed seams (butted seams) for shoemaking. Here’s a link to the handout I’ve written for people to take home as a reference after the class.
At the upcoming Canterbury Faire I am going to be teaching a class on making round closed seams (butted seams) for shoemaking. Here’s a link to the handout I’ve written for people to take home as a reference after the class.
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The awl you’re using for butted seams is wrong. The awl you should be showing is a curved awl … a saddle maker’s awl.
[Ebay URL removed by Admin]
Hi Nori, thanks for your comment.
Straight awls are appropriate for this type of work in a medieval/renaissance historical reproduction context. The awls pictured in scenes such as the Life of St Mark picture in the document, and that have shown up in finds from medieval contexts in places like York are all straight.
There are drawings of the finds from York in the book Leather and Leatherworking in Anglo-Scandinavian and Medieval York, which can be downloaded from the York Archaeology Publications Archive, linked to in the sidebar of this blog.
Modern shoemaker’s awls are usually curved to varying degrees depending on the task they’re for but that style of awl, and the sickle shaped awl you linked to, are modern (i.e. post-renaissance) inventions.
This post on the Crispin Colloquy has a good picture of the type of awl that was pictured in your ebay link.
The sickle shaped awls seem to be a particularly continental thing — I think of them as German, while the awls that are curved just at the tip and are otherwise straighter seem to be an English/American thing. [both comments are gross generalisations of course]
There are some really good pictures of modern shoemaker’s awls on this page on the Crispin Colloquy but they’re all modern ones.
I sometimes use a modern closer’s awl for some work, but a straight awl of an appropriate size and cross section works very well in the 2–2.5mm veg tanned leather I use for shoes.
Thanks.
–
William.
P.S I removed the Ebay link because the go stale after a while, and I prefer not to have commercial links on this blog.
Thank you for the excellent classes on Cbfair. And since we also haven’t found an army of Elves to help us ;-) we are going to try to make our own shoes. You inspired us a lot. Thanks!
Thank you, I’m glad you found them useful. I am revising the notes and will put the new version on here as soon as they’re done, in the meantime feel free to get in touch with any questions you have.
Have fun!