Craft Club: Iron Age Shoes

Hooray, it’s Wondercrew Wednesday! I love being able to share something special with my beloved Wondercrew, the kind folks who support me so I can share so many wonderful things with others. This week’s surprise is a Craft Club project that I’ve had a lot of fun designing, I hope you like it too!

Did you know you can make your own shoes with only some leather and minimal supplies? Long before there were standardized shoe sizes, shoes were created for the wearer, custom fit to last a lifetime (or longer - similar leather shoes have been discovered in bogs and melting glaciers as far back as the iron and bronze ages!) Why use leather? It’s durable. It’s sustainable. It is a by-product of beef consumption, which is still very much part of our culture. It forms to your feet, while still allowing you to feel the textures of the ground below. And it has been the go-to material for shoes in cooler climates since, well, ancient history!

I first learned about these shoes by this wonderful tutorial by EarthAndLiving. It’s a fantastic tutorial for anyone with a similar foot size to the author as she provides specific measurements, but it wouldn’t work very well for feet of different sizes. I decided to adapt this tutorial to fit anyone’s body; by using parts of your hands and feet for all of the measurements, you can ensure that you’ll make shoes that fit you much better. These shoes are fairly adjustable, but they’ll fit better to begin with if you create them just for you. This tutorial will walk you through all the steps of making a template for your own custom shoes, then how to make and assemble them. You can put them together in an afternoon or evening, once you have the necessary supplies! Don’t be intimidated by the number of steps; if you take them one-by-one and look at the template, you’ll do just fine.

Find the rest of this post and the Craft Club Project over on Patreon.com/thewondersmith!

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