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    Making my own footwear

    A pair of blue leather shoes with red leather highlights converging at the toes

    Beam me up Scotty? I don’t think anyone else has a pair of shoes identical to these! (And because they are handmade, the left shoe is not 100% identical to the right). The strong red patterns fool the eye into not noticing the very wide toes.

    I started making my own shoes, boots and sandals because every pair I bought hurt my feet.

    Footwear should (but mostly doesn't):

    So-called minimal or barefoot styles are much more likely to have these features. But in my experience, many still don't have a wide enough space for the toes: they pull toes out of alignment.

    Conventional footwear almost always has some combination of tapering toes, raised heels, stiff and/or cushioned soles, and toe spring: all characteristics that cause all kinds of foot problems.

    In other words, almost all of the footwear you can buy will harm your feet if worn for months or years, and so ruin your health.

    If you can't buy it, you need to make it

    I want to wear footwear that:

    Close-up of a veg-tan welt being sewn with 1mm thread onto a blue leather upper nailed to a last

    For this shoe, I used a welt to hand-sew the upper to the sole. This produces a very neat result, but is a time-consuming technique that requires specialist tools. Stitchdown and moccasin techniques need fewer tools and less time.

    Back in 2015, the only shoes I could buy that didn't make my feet throb were a pair of fluorescent yellow minimalist running shoes (made by Altra, no longer available). More about the foot issues I was experiencing.

    So in desperation, I decided I needed to make what I needed.

    I built this website partly for myself, to document some of the shoemaking methods I've learned and invented, and partly to share my philosophy and thoughts with anyone who is interested.

    Make your own, to fit your feet exactly …

    There is no one right way to make footwear. You will see different techniques used elsewhere, and that's fine.

    I hand-make all mine: cutting and sewing using hand tools. Others might use machines to do some of the work.

    I also try to avoid all glues, especially those that contain organic solvents, so you may see me stitching things that others are happy to glue. The only thing I use a solvent-based glue for is attaching a rubber outsole onto the leather sole of the finished piece of footwear.

    All my footwear is to my own design, so I make my own patterns.

    If you want patterns for shoes, boots, or sandals that let your feet and body move naturally, you may well have to create them yourself, because patterns you find online are almost always for conventional footwear: they have features that are very bad for feet, and hence for general health… after all, who wants to exercise when their feet are hurting?

    A blue canvas boot with brown leather trim and brown laces, on a right foot clad in cream sock and blue jean leg

    A zero-drop (no raised heel) boot bought by a friend of mine from Lem's Shoes in 2016.

    …Or buy minimalist/barefoot styles

    If designing and making your own footwear is not for you, that's completely understandable: it involves expense and a great deal of time.

    Instead, look for minimal or barefoot styles to buy. But be aware that not everything labeled as minimal or barefoot has wide-enough toes, or a complete absence of heel.

    Thankfully, there are more and more foot-friendly options available to buy these days. For instance, since I started making my own shoes, the following have come onto the market:

    More about me, and why I started shoemaking.