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.

 

 

1790s Painted Shoe Tutorial: Part I

 

Up in Reno last September, I was lucky enough to score a pair of American Duchess Kensington shoes on Poshmark.  I've always liked the idea of using bright yellow as a neutral shoe color, and this pair seemed a very good opportunity to color myself a pair of bright yellow mid-century shoes.

 

I've never worked with leather before- in any manner- so I did a lot of reading.  Most costumers seem to favor paint, but a few use leather dye.  Both approaches seemed reasonably reasonable, so I took myself off to the Reno Tandy leather store, where dithering over the racks of paints and dyes, I was approached by a fellow most GLORIOUSLY decked out in a leather apron painted in all sorts of swirls and swatches. We had a talk about the merits of dye vs paint and which would wear best - by which I mean I mentioned both options, and he asked if I'd worked with leather before, and on hearing me say "No, but -" stopped me at the "no" and told me in no uncertain terms that as a first timer, I would definitely be going home with the leather paints.

I came home to Chile with bottles of Angelus leather preparer, Angelus leather finisher and Angelus leather paint.  I also came home with a second pair of shoes.  I didn't want to jump straight to my precious Kensingtons, so I went on ebay and bought an inexpensive pair of Sam Edelman leather flats to use as a test bunny for all my new bottles.  With  a little luck, my 1790s Green Blob gown would also end up with a lovely pop of yellow peeping out from below the hem.

Back home, I worked on the two pairs at once -  testing each step on the flats, and then moving onto the Kensingtons.  This post will be warts and all description of what I did and how it did it.  My hope is that my process - mistakes, corrections and the lot - may prove useful for anyone else thinking about a pair of custom colored historical shoes!

Step One: Prepping the Leather.

The first order of business was to remove existing glaze and polish. It was a straightforward operation: I put some Angelus leather Preparer/Deglazer solution on a clean rag, and wiped carefully over the shoes.  I wiped down all 4 shoes, and then I did it again, just to make certain I had caught all the folds and wrinkles in the leather.

 

The stuff works pretty much instantaneously - you can see and you can feel the difference between the polished and the deglazed shoe.
In fact, so powerful is this stuff, that I left the rag sitting on the toe of one of the flat shoes for all of 10 seconds while I put the lid back on the bottle, and it stripped right through the glaze and the leather dye, leaving a large irregular mark that took several extra layers of paint to cover up.

I found this accident quite reassuring. Clearly, if I really screwed up with my paint job, I would have absolutely no problem stripping my work and starting again.

Caveat: Later, when I began painting the Kensingtons, I discovered that I had not removed all of the original glaze.  The paint was skating over patches of leather like watercolor paint over a  wax resist. 

With multiple coats of paint, I was eventually able to cover these areas, but it was an interesting lesson in how shoe polishes and glazes differ from brand to brand. The Sam Edelman flats had stripped very easily, but the AD formula is more tenacious.  When you do your pre-paint stripping with the Angelus Preparer/Deglazer, do your AD shoes again. And possibly a third or fourth time as well, just to be certain.

Step 2: Taping the Heels and Soles

I was thorough about this.  I was VERY thorough about this - cutting and pressing many infinitesimal bits of painters tape onto the curves of the heels on the Kensington shoes, and I  will say up front that this was probably the biggest mistake that I made in the whole exercise:

 

Angelus leather paint is an acrylic paint.  This means that it doesn't sink into the surface of the leather.  It sits on it and makes a film on top of the shoe  - and on top of the tape where I splashed over the edge of the heel, and when I  removed the tape at the end of the paint job, I ripped entire strips of paint away with it.  The way some costumers ended up painting the edges of their shoe soles black at the end of the whole process started making a whole lot more sense.

 

 Step 3: Painting the Shoes

I didn't want to use the yellow color straight out of the Angelus bottle. I wanted a softer, more lemon-y shade.

 

In a lidded plastic tub, I mixed yellow with white, and thinned it out with water.  The tutorials had recommended quite a thin mix - and here, again, I overdid it, and mixed up a lovely thin glaze of color that painted on without streaking or lumping, but when I had reached 10 coats on the flat shoes, I realized I may have gone just a little off the rails, and I left the lid off of the paint tub to evaporate some of the water out.

Tips for Painting: 

DO use thin coats.  It doesn't have to be translucently thin, but it needs to be thin enough to flow cleanly over the shoe without stippling or streaking.  I did find that a smaller brush tended to result in less streaking than a large one.

 

I found that the best results came from letting the paint dry completely between coats. It is quite humid where I live, and I found the best thing was to lay down a coat of paint, seal the lid on the plastic paint tub, and walk away and do something else for 15-30 minutes. Take your time, go gently, and build your color.

When you come back to the next coat, make sure to stir your paint before you apply the next one! The paint pigments have different densities, and if you don't remix your color you're liable to find you have lighter and darker patches across your shoe.

When you have built up the color to a strength that you like, stop, take a moment, and think "Holy HECK. If I scuff these shoes, I am never ever ever going to match this custom color.  I should have used the paint as it came, straight out of the bottle."  

 

 

But it will be too late for regrets by then, so bury your feelings down deep and move on to -

Step 4:  Removing the Painters Tape

As I wrote above, this was where I ran into my first real snag.  Removing the tape around the heel edges, I also removed strips of paint! 

 

At this point I stopped stripping, and went around the entire edge of the heel with a craft knife, digging deep into the join between leather heel and shoe body. And then I removed the rest of the tape. Very carefully.

 

Fortunately, the stripped patches filled in quite easily.  The texture is faintly blobby, but it is hidden in the under-curve of the shoe body, and anyone close enough to see that deserves all the satisfaction they get.

A bigger problem for me was all the paint that had gotten under the tape and onto the heel.

At this point I was thinking some pretty serious thoughts about all the time I'd spent taping the damn things. I tried chipping with a knife, but didn't make much headway. I tried dabbing with the Preparer/Deglazer, but discovered that the dark color of the sole edges was coming off and leaving bleached spots! At this point I decided that I could either paint the heels entirely or leave them as they were, but as I

a) didn't have any brown or black paint 

 

and

 

b) figured I'd just end up splashing back up onto the shoe body if I tried, I decide to move on and let it go. If someone sees it, good luck to them.  Lying down with your nose in the grass to critique a paint splash on the underside of a shoe deserves SOME sort of win.

 

Step 5:  Sealing the Shoes
 

Color applied and holes patched, it was time to seal and varnish the shoes.  The procedure was pretty simple - pour a bit of Angelus satin shoe sealer into a bowl and apply it with a brush.  Again, a smaller brush was more effective than a larger one, and again, I applied several coats, with resting time between each.  In consideration of future difficulties matching a custom color, I had some idea that more coats would provide more protection against scuffs.  I have no idea how effective this will turn out to be.  It will be an interesting experiment.

Using the sealer is where I discovered my second and third mistakes -

Mistake 1: 

 

I strongly suggest that when you seal your shoes, dry the sealer coats with the shoes sitting beneath an overturned plastic tub.  Or else knock up your local high school chemistry department and ask to borrow their fume hood.
Any dust that settles on your shoes will get stuck in that varnish. And if you're not paying particular attention, you may not notice this until the second or third coat, and then that cute little grey curl of dust across the tip of your pretty yellow shoe?
It's there FOREVER.

My third mistake was a GLARING one. In doing my pre-project research, I had seen that a small minority of people were choosing a matte varnish over the satin one, claiming that the satin was just too shiny.  The Tandy leather man had voted for the satin, so I went that way as well, and HOLY HECK - on these shoes, that satin-coat finish was about as satiny as a brand new patent vinyl raincoat. Under a stage-light. You know that very twentieth-century ultra-high-gloss high-beam plastic leather finish?
Yeah, that one.  That's what my shoes looked like.

 

The Glamour Beneath the Glitz

 

You forget to pack your stockings. Two pairs of modern thigh-highs doubled up might do it -

So off in a hurry to the big box stores and - ta-dah!

Except the pack you grabbed are NOT one-size fits most. They fall off.

To the rescue, your mother-in-law and her elastic grab bag! A happy ending for everybody!!!

Ah, the glamour beneath dressing up like pretty pretty princesses in big skirts!!!!

The Green Blob in the Fall: a 1790s gown goes on a progress

 

Last fall I went up to Reno.  I took the Green Blob with me to get some photos with the autumn color. High summer in Malta had required a fairly minimalist approach to 1790s chic, but the cool crisp weather of October was very suitable for a more decked-out formal approach!

 

 

I arrived just as the leaves were beginning to turn.  Every day while I was there, I would say "today?" and my Mother-in-law would say "Wait, wait - "
And then - two days before I flew home, she said "NOW." 
And I dressed, and we went - and there just aren't words.  It was magnificent.

 

 

The Green Blob was glorious! Everything was glorious!  I wasn't limited to traveling light and I brought along some of my carefully collected accessories - antique lace, vintage leather gloves, antique portrait brooch and a celluloid brisé fan. Instead of a large sash, this time I wore a simple tassel cord, tacked into place at the peak of the raised back waist.

 

Honestly, I swanked.

I also debuted my new wig - the classic "80s Boogie Babe,"  available on amazon and quite a lot of party store websites, and REMARKABLY good value for an over the top 1790s look. My mother in law and I did want over the top  - in fact, we were so enthusiastic that we layered two Boogie Babes on top of the other!

 

The result was possibly excessive. I mean, it wasn't excessive if the year was 1985, the genre was hair metal, the venue was Rio de Janeiro and you were Whitesnake,  but for a genteel jaunt through a golden fall in in the year 1797 when they hadn't yet invented hairspray or the ozone layer - possibly it was a little too much. Possibly.

Regretfully, perhaps, we came down on the side of restraint and I only wore one.  I did wind a purple lamé scarf from the actual 80s around my head, so I wasn't entirely bereft of a little rock chic. 

My jewelry was glorious as well - my necklace and my HONKING pearl earrings (honestly, I reckon I could indeed have worn the double-layered hair just to balance out these divine things) are both by Taylor of  Dames a la Mode. She is doing some wonderful 1790s stuff right now - and it is sized to work for both the late Georgian period and 1980s hair metal.

 

So there I was - decked, dressed, and deeply elegant - and the Autumn sun was pouring down and drenching the world in liquid gold -

 

Guess who stomped around like a pretty pretty princess?

Introducing Lady Hamilton in Malta

 

I took off that bloody petticoat!!!  And now this voile 1790s gown MOVES!

There is no bustle pad at the back, as the bustle pad had been sewn to the under-petticoat, but that’s a small loss when I'm looking like a Greek goddess on a spring picnic instead of like her laundry hamper.

 

And the purple silk sash against the green in the strong Mediterranean sunshine is just…(chef’s kiss).

 

Lady Hamilton is very fashion forward with her stylish sandaled feet, but she is also sentimental, and she is wearing a necklace that her husband (Sir William Hamilton) bought for his first wife before she died (in 1792).

And she didn’t have time to style her wig before she got on the airplane to Malta, so she slapped it onto her head, tied a scarf around it and hoped for the best.

 

Which she got, of course. Emma, Lady Hamilton makes her own chic.

 

 

I do declare - Emma, Lady Hamilton, is something of a vamp.

 

 

(Historically accurate photograph of a merveilleuse wrangling her acres of silly skirt.)

The Green Blob Goes Forth!

About 3/4 of the way into the construction of the Green Blob, I went on holidays!

Vaxxed, double-boosted, and in the heightened immunity window of having recently recovered from the C myself, I flew off to Europe.  Knowing I was heading to places with  far more scope for neoclassical backdrops than can be found in Iquique (known neoclassical building count: zero), I bundled the Green Blob into my suitcase and brought it along.

 

I put the last stitches into the Green Blob on Malta, and very early one morning,

 

 

before the heat rose up

 

We drove over the hill to the parish church of Mellieha, and brought her out to show her off. 

 

The Green Blob, a 1790s Gown : First Fitting and Sleeves

First Fitting:

When I drafted the bodice of this gown, I wasn't sure where I wanted the neckline to sit. Accordingly, I cut a very shallow neckline, and once the gown body was assembled, ran a rudimentary drawstring across the top of the neck, gathered up the bulk, and shoved wads of fabric down the front of my stays until I had a level that I liked.

Next step was the hem - I still didn't have an assistant, so I begged 15 minutes from my very busy neighbor and ran across the street in my bustled petticoat and gown to have her put in some pins at the level where she reckoned the gown ought to stop. In her full length mirror, the result was, well -

The gown had a LOT less flow than I had been expecting. 

This right here is a perfect example of the effects of underpinnings on a gown.  This particular under-petticoat was originally built for a later mid-regency silhouette. I'd tacked on a little bustle pad at the level of the 1790s back waist seam and expected all would be good - but over the relatively stiff fabric of the petticoat, the yards of gathered 1790s voile looked less like a classical goddess and more like a bale of bedsheets. There was no DRAPE!

 

Making a mental addendum to ditch the under-petticoat, it was time to take care of the sleeves.

This gown is a mashup between the American Duchess book and the American Duchess Simplicity pattern. I worked from the AD book to draft the bodice, but by myself without a mannequin, draping sleeves were NOT possible.

Accordingly, I bought the AD simplicity pattern and took the sleeves and shoulder head from that - and it was a disaster.

 

I don’t believe I was misreading the marks and notches, but i ended up having to rotate the sleeve seam almost 3 inches up the bodice to get it to fit the armscye, and attempts to formally redraft the rotation went absolutely pear-shaped,  and no matter what I did, I never could get the sleeve to a point where I could lift my arms more than about an inch.

 

Fortunately, by the time i actually needed to attach sleeves to the body of the gown, I had an assistant again, and I took a very simple and direct approach:

i cut a very loose sleeve with an overly large shoulder head and sewed it to the gown, then had my assistant progressively pin out the fullness, making sure that I could still move my arms at every step.

 

When i liked the look, i stopped and transferred the markings to my pattern, and voila -a sleeve.