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Contents 1 How to make Boots from Scratch 1.1 Materials 1.2 Tools 1.3 Procedure

How to make Boots from Scratch

This is a tutorial on how I made my boots for my PSE 12 costume(Range Murata) which could also work for other chunky soled type boots. Reference image

Materials

• Pair of shoes or sandals that have the soles you like
• Acrylic paint - if you need to paint the soles
• Fabric for inside the shoes
• Interfacing
• Plastic resin
• Vinyl or pleather (or whatever else you want to make the boot outside look like

Tools

• Sandpaper - if you are going to paint the soles, sand them first
• Super glue

Procedure

The soles I used were from a cheap pair of platform sandals that I bought from a charity shop(so at least I was supporting a good cause at the same time )

I just cut off the straps to leave me with just the sole. They were originally black whick I painted white with acrylics(I first used spraypaint but it tends to crack quickly.Would probably also be a good idea to sand the rubber first so it has a better grit to it for the paint to stick).For extra comfort I just stuck on those spongey sole things that are usually soled in most stores(those types you slip into your shoe).

Next thing I did was take some scrap fabric and made a pattern of what my final boot will look like, I used Sarcasm Hime's tutorial for making boot covers but just altered it a bit for my boots. I used boots I already had as a base for my mockup and did the pinning according but cut the toes off and added extra space in the front of the boots. The reason I did this was because the soles are high heeled but I wanted my boots to be "flat" heeled.

Once that was done I took the patterns, traced them onto some fabric that I had lying around (doesn't matter what it looks like since it's going inside the boot) and ironed a firm interfacing onto all 4 pieces(2 for each boot). There's a definate right and left side so just be careful which pieces you sew together (keep the toes seperate from the rest of the boot) (As a note,I had to sew darts into the toe areas and the side of the boot areas so they'd have the right shape).

Once that's all sewn up take the toe areas and pin them onto onto the soles first. At the moment they're still kinda floppy but here's the TRICK! While pinned I stuffed them with plastic bags and then painted plastic resin (F18) straight onto the fabric to make it hard and keep it's shape. Gotta brush it on fairly quickly since the plastic cures quickly. Pull out the plasic and voila you have solid toe tips which will help form the rest of your boot. Hammer a few tacs in to keep it in place (but not too many since the cover still needs to be tacced down).

For the rest of the boot I used the same patterns and cut them out of vinyl which I ironed batting to to make it "thicker "(pleather would probably have been sturdier but I didn't know this at the time :P ). Sew the fabric with the interfacing to the vinyl making sure the facing will eventually be on the inside. What's nice about working about vinyl/pleather is that it doesn't frey which made the rest of it a bit easy. Test to make sure the covers are going to fit

Tip:Mark left and right sides clearly since it's easy to get confused which is which side,this will jsut make your life a little easier.

Before sewing the long boot areas/tubes to the toes pin everything to the sole first to get the right fit and mark off on the toe tips where they join and sew there.

It's a tricky area to sew,I used a zigzag stitch but landed up sewing parts of it by hand.

After that pin everything to the sole and tac down. I added most of the details afterwards since I wanted the tacs to be covered.The white pieces are cut out of white pleather and just glued on. The orange strip that goes all round the sole area is hose pipe sliced down the middle filled with silicone and covered with pleather then painted with acrylic which was then glued on using super glue. The cones were sculpted, molded then cast in plastic, painted and glued on.

And there you have it!!