A skull I found by the river, I’m not sure what kind of animal it came from.
Raccoon prints by the water.
I don’t get back to Maine as often as I want to, so when I want to be reminded of it, I head 40 minutes outside of Pittsburgh. It’s the closest I can get to the rocky rivers I grew up with.
Progress on my cloth shoes. The next step is stitching the upper to the midsole.
The perils of working with Ventile. I broke two needles today while trying to stitch this cloth shoe. After this pair, I’m not sure I’ll want to make cloth shoes again.
My first clothing from Kapital, a pair of socks that I got thanks to Jonathan @ Bandanna Almanac.
Altering clothing didn’t adequately prepare me for making something out of cloth. My first pair of cloth shoes is going much more slowly than I hoped. The process of making sure no edges are unfinished led me to undo hours of stitching when I realized I made a mistake in the construction. Then eyelets worked well in practice, but didn’t cooperate on what I hope will be the final shoe. One line of eyelets isn’t aligned well, but I don’t want to waste fabric trying again until I know the design will work. Plus, I don’t have much spare fabric (either the kasuri outer fabric or the Ventile inner fabric). But it is a pair for me, and I’m willing to live with mistakes I wouldn’t accept in shoes for somebody else.
The one problem with just using stitching is what happens if the stitching breaks. The tongue fell off yesterday. It did allow me to correct a minor sizing issue with the tongue, and it convinced me to add a second row of stitching on the next pair. It took a little work to figure out how to stitch the tongue back on, since using a needle inside the shoe isn’t easy. But I love that I can repair my shoes myself, I don’t need to just get replacements.
I saw a scan from a Japanese magazine where a blue blazer had patchwork panels applied to the lapels and pockets and decided to try something similar. I had a small collection of fabric scraps from old jeans, a denim shirt, some swatches of Japanese indigo fabric, some Guatemalan ikat, a bit of a blackwatch tie, and a bandana that my wife made during college. I spent the last few days stitching the scraps together and then to the jacket.
