1790s Painted Shoe Tutorial: Part II

 

At the end of Part 1, I had just discovered that the Angelus Satin Leather finisher had turned my 18th century shoes into patent plastic disco balls.  At this point I shoved them into a cupboard and went out to find the matte version of the leather finisher.

This presented a certain difficulty. There are a lot of companies that don't ship to Chile, and unfortunately, Angelus is one of them. Eventually I found a seller on Mercado Libre who had a crate of it, and for an absolutely extortionary price, I paid to have one single bottle shipped from Santiago to Iquique.
I was dubious about it, but when it arrived it was either the best fake I've ever seen - down to serial numbers and original Angelus shipping paper, or it was the real thing. Either way, I hadn't much of a choice. The shoes were lighting up the inside of my closet.  I wiped them carefully for dust bunnies, applied a layer of matte glaze and put them under a tipped over tupperware crate to dry. And then I did it twice more.

The glaze was dimmed - not shut down, but dimmed. The shoes were still bright and shiny, but it was the shiny that a really diligent shoe polisher could get with wax and elbow grease- not a violently modern space age plastic shine.

Step 6:  Trimming the Shoes

 

I trimmed my yellow 1790s shoes with pink petersham ribbon. I had two widths of it - 5/8" inches to be doubled over around the shoe opening and 3/8" inches to mark the center back and side seams.  The ribbon was glued on with Fabri-tac glue.

If you haven't used it before, you need to know straight up -  Fabri-tac is the devil.  The literal devil.  It sets almost instantaneously, but it comes out in gobs so it needs to be spread out, and that particular combination of qualities is awful.
I found the best method to be running a bead of glue along my glue-line, then spreading it out with a finger or a palette knife, then running over it a second time to remove any remaining globs that could soak thru the ribbon, and then pressing the fabric onto the glue line.

Beginning with the short back and side seams, I turned the raw edge of  the 3/8" ribbon under, tacked it in place with a dab of glue, and then glued the strip in place, folding the top edge over the lip of the shoe and holding that down with a large glob.

 

Next I bound the open edge (Rim? Shoe cavity? Foot hole?) with the 5/8" ribbon.  Working in short sections, I glued the ribbon to the inside of the lip.  Once it was in place, and working again in sections, I folded the ribbon over to the outside and glued it down, again working in small sections, and pressing it down with sewing clips.

 

I had some difficulty with the ribbon around the heel.  The suede panel on the heel became very stiff when painted, and I wasn't able to flatten out the curve enough to successfully lay the petersham from the inside.  It turned out to be easiest to run a second piece over the back of the heel, working outside-in. This extra piece is not symmetrical on one shoe - when i was gluing it down, the glue spread out from under the top layer and stained the bottom piece, so i had to rip the patch off and start again with a longer one to cover the stain!

 

 

 

And voila - there they were.  My fingers were a mess of glue blobs and petersham threads, but the shoes were a POEM in pink and yellow, ready for field tests.

Or almost - I wanted pompoms on the toes. 
I largely followed Frolicking Frocks' tutorial for this. I made four pompoms out of silk embroidery floss, tied them off in the center, and layered them on a pair of shoe clip blanks: two pompoms per blank, stacked cross-ways.  
Once they were stitched tight, I cut the loops and trimmed the shaggy edges.

I'd covered a pair of American pennies in a scrap of silk for the centers, but my pom-poms were rather small.  I only had one skein of pink silk floss, and carefully portioning it out into four pom-poms left 'em definitely on the petite side. Not even wishful thinking could make it work.

In my button box I found a pair of small mother of pearl shank buttons, so I stitched them on in place of the silk buttons.

And - Voila! all over again - these shoes have gone from cotton-candy sweet to bleeding ADORABLE.