(Edit­ing another post to fix the date I realised this one has been sit­ting in draft state for ages with­out actu­ally get­ting pub­lished. I wrote this post in April ’09)

These are shoes I made for two mem­bers of my house­hold who were asked to join the royal house­hold of our SCA king and queen. The king and queen are doing Merovingian-era, and wanted their house­hold to have match­ing cloth­ing and period shoes. This was one of those sit­u­a­tions where I’d have liked to have taught the wear­ers how to make the shoes but they needed them in a hurry and it was quicker to make them myself than it would have been to teach peo­ple how to make them.

Both of these are based on exam­ples in Step­ping Through Time close in time to but not specif­i­cally Merovin­gian. I don’t have any spe­cific sources on early period shoes other than Willy Groenman-Van Waateringe’s bit in STT.

All this hap­pened just before a major event at the begin­ning of this year, mean­ing these were real rush jobs. I did both pairs, includ­ing fit­ting, in two and a bit evenings. The pho­tographs were also rather rushed, taken while the shoes were still damp from turn­ing, so the colour of the leather isn’t nec­es­sar­ily true to life.

For­tu­nately, given the time con­straints, they are quite sim­ple shoes. Both are car­batines — the sole and upper all being the same piece — which made the pat­tern­ing quite a lot eas­ier. It also cut down on the required sewing a lot because there wasn’t a sole seam to do. I’m not sure I could have done two pairs of shoes with sep­a­rate soles in that time with­out skiv­ing off work and fore­go­ing a lot of sleep.

Rushed as they were there are pat­tern­ing issues I would have fixed if I’d had more time. Mainly the toe on the ones with the pierced tounge is much too pointy, it should be a lot more rounded. The point of the heel on one of that pair is well off cen­tre too, I fixed it on the sec­ond shoe but didn’t have time to remake the first one on the fixed pat­tern. Those are fairly minor things though and I’m quite happy with them over­all. Impor­tantly the con­struc­tion is sound and rea­son­ably neat despite hav­ing been done in a hurry and it’s nice to know I can get away with that. I can do very neat work, but the abil­ity to do very neat work at a good speed is some­thing that only comes with a lot of practice.

The leather is my stan­dard 2.5 mm veg-tanned bovine shoul­der. I was orig­i­nally going to make these out of thin­ner, 1.5 mm, leather for fear the thicker stuff wouldn’t take the rather dras­tic form­ing around the toe but the 1.5 mm leather I had turned out to be too thin and flimsy.

These shoes are held onto the legs with ties thread­ing through the holes in the tounge. Orig­i­nally they’d have been woven or braided, we ended up using some nice bro­caded rib­bon. I can’t remem­ber if we slot­ted the heel to thread the tape through or not.

The dec­o­ra­tion was free­hand scribed into damp leather with a scratch awl. The teardrop cutouts are a punched hole and two straight cuts to form the point.

The side seam of the toe is a round closed seam inside. The ‘tail’ lying over the vamp was tunnel-stitched down after the shoe was turned. I can’t base this on any­thing other than that it seemed like the obvi­ous way to do it but I’m happy with how it came out.

Still-wet shoes just turned. These were dec­o­rated before being closed. The dec­o­ra­tion on one is darker than the other because I left it out in the sun after doing the work which dark­ened the exposed leather in the grooves. On the other I did the dec­o­ra­tion after leav­ing the leather in the sun so the grooves are lighter than the grain sur­face. This will change over time as they’re worn out­doors but I like the effect on the new shoe.

Long seam up the mid­dle of the vamp. This is a whip-stitched butted seam as on the orig­i­nals, not a round closed seam

Here you can see the back seams and the inside of the vamp seam. These are slip-on shoes with­out a fas­ten­ing. The slits at the sides allow the foot to get in and out.