Sandal-Making 101

1. Hello Sandal-Makers!: Hello, I'm Rachel and I design and make shoes. I have a company called Rachel Sees Snail Shoes. Part of what I do is make unique shoes and sell them online and make custom shoes for people, and the other half of what I do is I teach sandal making classes. I really love teaching the sandal making classes because it's so fun, and also it's taught me a lot about what is possible and what is difficult and the best designs for beginning shoe makers. I've been making shoes for about six years now. I came to shoe and sandal making when I met a clog maker, and I was so impressed by what I saw, it seemed like such a beautiful thing to do to make a shoe that I decided to try it myself. I learned by looking at shoe making books, by corresponding with shoemakers through e-mail, and really just trial and error. I bought a lot of materials at a local cobblers supply and experimented with those until I finally found what I think are the best simple materials to make your first pair of shoes. I believe in learning by doing, so I'll demonstrate each step of the sandal making process for you and I hope you enjoy it. 2. Class Project: Sandals: After teaching sandal making for several years, I'm very confident that anyone can do it, if they have some patients and the right leather and a few basic tools. Today we'll be making a really simple time sandal like this. It's super comfy, it has a rubber sole, open toe, open heel, and ties with a leather lace. There's a lot of variations you can do on this. I'd love it if you would share some photos of your progress, and that could be photos of your inspiration, photographs of your sketches and you're drawings, so what you're going to make, pictures of your materials and tools gathered and your leather pieces, and then finally, pictures of your finished sandals and even those sandals on your feet. The pride and having made your own footwear is a really special feeling, and I think you'll notice that other people notice handmade shoes from faraway and want to ask you about it, and it's really fun to tell them that it's possible to make your own and to share that with people. I hope you join me in learning the skill. 3. Materials: Gathering the correct materials is probably the most important thing you can do. To make these sandals, there's only a few components. There's round leather laces but you can use any laces you find or make with ribbon but I like this kind of round leather lacing. This is a spool of a pretty thick one. Then for the uppers or the straps, we'll be using a 45 ounce weight vegetable-tanned leather and I bought a whole side here and this is quite soft. Sometimes it's a bit stiffer but I like this soft stuff especially for a beginning sandal maker. Then for the top soling, you want a heavier, thicker leather so this is a 78 ounce weight of vegetable-tanned leather. Just a small strip of it. This is the soling we'll be using. This one happens to be Vibram brand in this terracotta color. Those are the four materials that this shoes are made out of and next I'll go over tools. 4. Tools: So these are the tools we'll be using today, I think I've narrowed it down to the very simplest tools you can find. A ruler or a straight edge of any kind, a ball-peen hammer, any hammer with the softer hammer head so you don't mark the leather when you hit it, a hole punch for leather, I like the rotary hole punch, a scratcher for marking leather, poking holes and scratching up surfaces, pens and pencils, I like Sharpies because other pens sometimes run on the leather and it will get everywhere, so Sharpies are good one to stick to. Any scissors will work but I really like nice fancy fabric scissors because it cuts leather really well, and an Alpha brand utility knife with snap off blades. I find that this is a great knife for working with leather because you can continually snap off the blades to make sure you're using a really sharp blade and also you can roll it out to be long or short depending on which activity you're working on. Then shoe glue, I most often use Barge brands, you can find it almost anywhere and it's quite toxic, so you should use it outside always. You'll need some paper for making your pattern and a cutting mat for cutting your leather pieces out on top of, and that's it. There are a few other things you may want to invest in, this is a leather rougher and it makes really quick work of roughing up the bottom of your sole. I like double-sided tape for woodworking, for pulling your tabs in place and getting everything secure to check the fit. Then this is a shoe anvil which is great for sliding your shoe on upside-down and getting to hammer all the spots that are really hard to access without one of these. These are about $45 and you can find them online. So those are your tools. 5. Designing and Patterning: Now for making a pattern for your sandal. Remember it's going to look something like this. There's a lot of different options you can do. Here's a sole. You could do a thinner toe strap and you can do a very small ankle strap; the ties with the lace such as this. You could do like the one I have demonstrated here, a really thick back with a lot of coverage and a really thick toe; the ties with the lace. Draw anything that you might want to try. What else do I like to do? You could do a rainbow-arching-back piece with two-way soles and even do, if you're feeling ambitious, a crisscross toe strap something like this. Anyway those are all ideas. I like to have a pair of sandals on-hand that you wear, that you like. I think it's a good place to start and often tracing the sole shape of a pair of sandals that you actually wear is a really great beginning point. So I'm going to just trace this sole. I'm going to rocket like this, move this out of the way. This way I know it would fit me and I know I would be happy with it. I'm just going to make one sole pattern and mark one side right, and the other side left. That's all I need. Then for the toe straps, I recommend doing just a straight toe strap. You could do any width. I might mark out a few different widths and play around with one-inch strap, and then two-inch strap. Then for the backing piece, I have patterns that I have found that I like. Here is a sole pattern I know that I like and a size nine, here is a backing pattern I've used, the wraps around the ankle and ties here, other different patterns I've used in the past, the rainbow style one, this one wraps around and comes quite far around the front, strange shape, and I like this one. Maybe I'll do something like that, sit flow on the ankle. So for you at home, if you don't have any patterns on hand, which I doubt you do, I would just cut out a large piece of paper and start playing with it around your ankle. Try put it around your ankle, and cut away an ankle heel area. I'll show you how to do that. So I'll cut out these pieces and then we'll start playing with paper on our own feet. 6. Adjusting paper patterns: So now I'm going to work with some of my pattern pieces directly with my own foot. I'm going to just stick to my right foot for all this. So I have my sole pattern that I'll stand on and make sure it's looking right. I think it looks good, I like to have a little bit of space around my whole foot, but not like a huge halo margin, but just a little bit extra in the toe, a little extra in the heel and because they based this on a sandal I already wear, I know that it works for me. Then I have these two different toe strap widths that I wanted to play around with. I wanted to look at the wider strap and see how that feels, and I like the look of that, and then I have a narrower one-inch strap that I just wanted to try out, that looks okay but it looks a little light. So to do this, I might do two of those side-by-side. So I'm going to stick to the thicker strap for the sandal. Then for the backing, I have all my tried and true patterns and I can try on different ones. There's one, here's one with cutouts that comes up quite high on the ankle and I think I'm going to maybe use this one. So you want it to be snug against the back of your ankle and come around somewhere in the front to tie either with one hole or many. With all these straps, you want at least an inch and a half of extra tab room underneath your foot. So that includes the toes drop as well. You want it to be able to fold under and really have a lot of extra space underneath. If there's too much, that's fine we can cut it down later or you can clip it off now. That you want about an inch, inch-and-a-half on either side to go underneath. If you're making a pattern from scratch and you have a big scrap of paper and you're looking to make your back piece, you could just start with a big rectangle like this. Where did it begin? You just start sketching where you want it to go down to and removing paper as you go and you want it to be symmetrical but the fact is your foot isn't symmetrical, the inside and the outside are really different. So it doesn't need to be identical, you might have a higher edge on the inside or the outside depending on your foot. Then I'm going to cut out a big circle for the heel, then starting to get a pattern that I can work with. You can add tape, extra paper on if you wanted to add and you can take away, but that is the basic premise, is just playing with paper. So the pattern pieces I'm going to decide to use are this thick toe strap, and I have a little extra. So I'm going to take off some paper of the end, leaving me with about one-and-a-half inches on either side. Then I think I'm going to use this pattern piece, it's low on the ankle and comes around and almost touches the top of my foot.Okay. So I'm all set and I'm ready to trace these on the leather. 7. Tracing Onto Leather: Now it's time to trace our pattern pieces onto leather and rubber. I'll start with the sole shape. Of course, we want one right and one left. For the rubber soling, I like to leave about a centimeter margin all around the outside just to make sure it's going to be big enough when we attach the layers. So I'm going to float it out about a centimeter off the edge and then trace my right and then float it another centimeter away and trace the left. Right, left, all right. Then we have our heavier leather soling material. I'll look for a piece of leather that is not so marked up with wrinkles or any scarring. I see a good little section right about there, so I'll trace the left and missing this mark, I'll trace the right. 8. Cutting Out Leather pieces: When you're ready to cut the heavy leather sole in, I like to use a utility knife, because it's too thick for a scissors. I use the knife, almost like a pen, like I'm drawing, I'm using my pinky finger to be my guide, and I am just pulling through. Let's see, I actually got that in one cut, but sometimes you'll have to do two passes depending on how heavy your leather is. You can work in sections and just lop off the parts, the extra leather one at a time. When you're ready to cut out the foam rubber, be sure to leave that extra centimeter margin all around your shape. This is really all you need, is just the rough pieces cut out of your soles for joining later. Now we're ready to trace our upper strap pieces on the upper leather, which is a four or five ounce leather, and since I have this straight line to begin with, I'm going to just do my two toe straps right off of there. I'll just line this up here, mark it, and another one here. Remember you want it long enough to wrap underneath the foot and have at least 1.5 inches on either side. Then retracing this piece, I'll use my sharpie again just to make it really clear, and you can remember that the 1.5 inch tab will be underneath your foot, so, you can use messed up leather for that section if your piece lands on undesirable part of the leather. Because your pattern piece might not be entirely symmetrical, you want to be sure to flip it when you trace it so that they are the inverse of each other. I like to cut away my piece I'm working with from the larger hide, so, I can work with it more easily, and when I'm cutting this thinner leather, I like to use the scissors, because it's much easier to do curves like this than when you're using a knife. You're trying to cut the pen line away because this is not an area that will be sanded. This is your final cut. Now we have all of our pieces, we have our rubber soles, leather soles, toe straps, and ankle straps. If you see any bit of pen on any of your upper straps, I would recommend just cutting it down, so you don't see that. But don't worry about pen straps on your soles. We're ready to move on. Now might be a good time to share pictures of your pattern pieces cut out of leather if you are ready. 9. Please Share Pictures!: Now it'd be a good time to share any pictures you have of your sandal inspiration, your drawings or sketches of your sandals or your finished pattern pieces. 10. Draping Straps: Now that we have our pattern pieces cut out, we are ready to work with one foot, the right foot. You'll stand on your leather top sole and get your foot into position. We'll start with the toe strap. Now we're just draping the straps over our feet and finding what looks best. We are not dealing with feet yet, we're just dealing with where we want our straps placed. I feel that a strap too far back, will make this shoe flop and it might make you trip. Towards the front of the foot is best, but too far forward can look a bit awkward. I find that letting these four toes show and covering up the pinky is a good decision, but it's totally up to you. I like to look over really straight strap. Once you find the sweet spot and you're holding it and draping it around, then you get your pointy scratcheral and you're going to make a dot exactly at the point where the strap enter the top of the sole. You want to do that about a centimeter or three-eighths seven inch away from the edge. I'm holding it in a good spot, and I'm going to make a dot right there. Again, I'm going to make it right there. On the other side I'll do my two dots right by my pinky and then right back there. This requires some coordination because one hand is holding it tight and firm and the other hand is marking the dot, but you can do it. Then for the back strap, the same process, you can either stick your tabs underneath and wiggle the strap until it's just right or you can let the tabs flare outwards. But you're still looking for that spot right where the leather meets the leather at the very edge, and we're going to make a dot. You want the back ankle strap to be really snug against the back of your foot, and you want everything to drop in to place in a really comfortable way. I think I found it. For me back here, my spot will be right there and right there. Again, about a centimeter in from the outer edge. I'll do it on this side, dot and dot. Then you should have your sole with eight dots, and they should be really clear. If any of your dots ended up too close to the edge, when you punch the hole, just punch it inward from where you marked it. Your left hand has to really hold the whole strap into place while you find those marks. I've gotten that one, and then holding it steady on that dot. For the back piece, make sure it's tight against your heel there. You've plenty of tabs to go underneath the shoe. Earlier I found that the dot I want is right there. Then you should have eight dots marked out all about a centimeter away from the edge. 11. Holes and Slots: Now that we have our holes marked on our sole, one sole only, we can punch holes where we marked all these dots. To punch a hole, you'll use a little leather scrap on the back, and you'll use your rotary hole punch on the smallest setting that's possible, the number one size. You put this part on the table and use that as leverage and punch it out. You'll punch out your eight holes. Once you have these punched out, like so, you can put it face to face onto your left, and we'll just transfer the dots with a pencil. Now, we're ready to cut slots where we want our upper straps to enter into these narrow slots. You want them to not just have one cut but two parallel cuts, making a small sliver of negative space, kind of like this. You want the two lines to be parallel with the outside of the sole, so not necessarily super straight. Maybe I can show you with a pen, like this and like this. I'll show you how I do it. I use the knife and very carefully cut the first one and I stopped short, and then I go back and I cut the other. Sometimes it takes two passes to get through the thick leather. But we did that one, and then I turn it around to complete the cuts. Otherwise, you're in danger of dragging your line through the hole. This way it makes it a nice clean cut, and then you just pull that out, and you have your slot. If you don't do a great job at this stage, it's okay, because it actually ends up being quite invisible. Again, I stop short, turn it around, complete the cut, and pull it out. I'll show you what I mean. If this was kind of a ragged cut or wasn't that happy with it. As soon as you put the strap in place, you no longer really seed that outside and you never really see the inside. Just do your best. The only thing that you want to be careful of is not getting too close. Don't get this line too close to the outside because that would make for a really weak connection. 12. Fitting and Marking: Back to the barefoot. We have our sole of the right foot with our wrist slots cut out, and you have your upper pieces. So it's time to put those into position. Don't be alarmed if the width of the strap is not as long as the slot, like say, for example, your slot is much longer than the strap like this. It's because we intended it to go in at an angle. That is normal and even good. You get everything in the position. Then you're going to try it on your foot and you start to adjust the fit and target all the straps. When it's close, we can use tape to secure the straps to make sure the fit is exactly how we want it, or you can just trust that you have it correctly. But I think I'm going to try taping everything down. I'm going to start with the back piece here, and I'm going to take that into position. I like this double-sided wood working tape. I think it was something like this. I'll take the back part down and I'm ready to try it again. Let's see. That feels really good and snug. I'm happy with the back, so I'll leave that. Then the front feels great. I think I might just go ahead and mark the front. I don't even think I need to tape that. I'm going to hold it down. Then I see that there's a ton of overlap here and that's not desirable, so I'm going to cut off all that stuff, and I'm going to cut off this part. I know I wanted to enter in this direction, so I'm going to mark all those things. I'm going to clip off all the extra because ideally, my straps will just meet right in the middle, like that. I'll mark them here. Because I liked the backs the way they were landing, I'm going to mark these as well. Most importantly, I'm going to make marks right here so I know how deep to pull these straps in. You can make your mark right against the edge or two millimeters off the edge like I do. But you just want to keep it consistent. The way you like sandals to fit is you don't want to build it to tighten overestimated the weather's going to stretch. I like to build them to fit and it'll stretch a tiny bit, but it won't really stretch if it doesn't need to. I think my rule of thumb is I like to be able to wiggle one finger through the toe strap to make sure it's not too tight. Often with a thick toe strap, you might want to create dots on the underside, which means just cutting a little triangle about here, and here, and pulling these together so that it creates a little curvature on the outside. I'll show you how to do that. So continuing to keep in mind that line where I want it to stay, I want to just give it a little bit of shape. I tugged both sides of the tab inward a bit, same here, like this. That just gives it a little more shape so that it doesn't bailout too much on these corners. Now that I have all this marked, I'm ready to transfer my marks to the other shoe and I'll show you how to do that. 13. Transferring Marks: We have one sandal built up with tape, and we modified some of the strap placement here. I'm going to make a new master line in black. Now, this is where we want it to land. This is where we'll scratch and glue it, but these lines are staying the same. At this phase, I like to be really crazy about labeling everything. It might sound excessive, but this is the right shoe. I'm going to label it ''Right.'' I'm going to label each part of the shoe with it belongs to the right shoe. I even draw arrows towards the toes so I know which way is up, like that, and sometimes I even write inside outside. Outside is here inside is where the arch bend is, inside, inside, outside, outside and so on. Now we can remove all the tape. We're going to transfer all these lines and marks onto the left side. I'll start with the ankle strap. Keep my right shoe on the right and the left on the left. I'm going to put these two ankle straps together face to face. Luckily, my right one is labeled with an R, I'm just going to label the left one with an L, so I don't get confused. They're already the same size, nothing needs to be cut away. The second thing I do is I take these lines I made and I transfer them to the very edge of the Leather, here and here, here and here. That way when I do them face to face, I can transfer that edge line to the left by just peeking around the corner. I can put the right one back with right. Then on this left one, I just want to connect these dots. Guessing how these come together. This one is to the left. This way I know how deep to drop this into this shoe. I can put the left back into left home. The right back into its right home and move on to the toe. Now I'm taking the toe out and I have my left toe here again face to face, but this time the left toe needs to be trimmed down quite a bit. I'll just trace the right one right on top of it. Darts and all. I'm going to label this ''Left.'' I'm going to trim all that extra off. Then again, I'm going to do what I did before and look at this line I made. I'm going to transfer this to the very edge, like that. Then line them up face to face and transfer that edge line to the left. Then the right can go back into the right, and this, I just need to connect these two lines. I like to look at this one for a reference. These lines are relatively straight, so I'm going to just stick to straight lines for those, like that. I Know that the narrower part of the toe strap is always pointing towards the toe. That's just the way it is, this can go into here. Now that we know how deep to pull all these left straps in, that will tell us where to mark it on the underside, remember we wanted to pinch this together to create that dart. I feel safe then outlining it right here. This is where I'll all scratching glue that part. Same with this side, but if you want to be sure or say your feet are a little bit different from each other. You may want to tape them independently of each other and try them both on and make sure they both fit your feet correctly. 14. Scratch and Glue Tabs: All right, we're ready to scratching glue the top down. You want to get them in position and just give a little texture to all the areas we're going to scratch in, I mean glue. Because it's the hairy side of the leather glued to the hairy side of the leather, it doesn't need that much of scratching, but it's a good thing to keep in mind whenever you're gluing any leather. You want cross hatching lines when you're joining ceramic clay. When you're ready to glue, get all your tabs in place so that you are gluing the accurate undersides and not over gluing or anything. Whoops, sometimes if a strap is falling out of place, you may want to put a little piece of tape, right here to keep it in it's spot. The way this glue works, as you apply it to both surface, and you let it set up for 5-10 minutes, and then you join it. It's important to spread the glue all the way to the edge of the tabs. Don't skip. If any glue falls on to your upper, just let it dry and you'll be able to peel it off, but don't rub it in, that will create a stain. I'll give this 5-10 minutes to set up and then we'll come back and join them. 15. Joining and Hammering Tabs: So I brought in the shoes and I applied the glue outside of course. Please always use that glue outside or somewhere that's really well ventilated. Now I've waited 5 or 10 minutes and I'm ready to place the tabs down. Just be really mindful of where you had intended the tabs to go down and then just press it with your fingers. Like this, and this, and this. All right. Like that. Then if you don't have a shoe anvil, I would just use your fingers to really press, press, press all of those joined glue areas down with your fingers, and you can even tap it with a hammer. Certain areas are easier to access than say in here. But you can tap that with a hammer. But if you do have a shoe anvil, you can slide it on like this. Make sure the edges dragged against the anvil edge and just tap all those tabs down from the back. At this point, you can start to use your fingers to press the leather into an upright shape and give the toe a little bit of form, like that. 16. Skiving: Wonderful skiving, it's a little bit dangerous, but really fun. You'll take your [inaudible] knife or utility knife and roll it out quite long like maybe about four blades long, and lock it. Then what we're doing is we are taking down the edge of your tabs, so that you don't feel it under foot. You just want to bevel these edges, and some of them you might not even feel under foot at this phase, so you might want to slip your sandals on at this phase and really feel where do you feel a lump or a bump or an edge? That's the place to focus on for your skiving. I happen to know that right here, that hits right where your heel hits, so we want to flatten that area out really well. This part you won't even feel, and these parts you might feel, so I'll skive all these a bit. You never cut, of course, this area, that would make a really weak connection for this drops to attach. But you want to skive all these outer edges. So you really bend the shoe quite a bit to be able to access this cutting area. So I'm just going to cut towards my body and take that edge down a bit, like that, and if there's any overlaps or lumps where your dart is, you can flatten it with the knife blade. I'm always moving it to make the work easier for myself, and I like to brace it against my body, and a lot of people have the impulse to cut towards their own thumb as if cutting an apple, but I think that's a bad idea. I think you should move your thumb out of the way. Bend the work a lot and then just cut, and make sure your blade is are really sharp, I actually feel like this isn't the sharpest one, so I might grab another knife. So it should be a really smooth transition between the tab and the sole. Here it is, middle is pretty good. But the best test is just trying it on and feeling if you feel any lumps. I wanted to mention that I like to cross my legs so that the work I'm working on is right below my face and close to my body. It's just my favorite way to do skiving. I think if you were working on a table like this, it's harder to get the leverage you need. So this is my favorite position. 17. Scratch and Glue Sole: Now that we've skived all of our tabs underneath to be nice and smooth, we want to scratch up the entire surface especially the centimeter around the edge because that would be the part that would eventually pull up if you were to wear them a lot and the glue would weaken or something. You want to do a better job than last time at doing crosshatching and scratching and giving in a lot of good texture for the glue to hold on to. You're going to do the tabs, and also just the bottom of the sole. Like I said, really focus on that outer perimeter all the way to the edge. It may work better to do this phase in your lap to get a better hold of it. These scratchers work just great, but if you're lucky enough you may find a rougher tool which is also really good for roughing up large surfaces. Like that. Moving on to the other one. This is the last gluing phase. Again, you put it on both surfaces separately and let it set up for just five or 10 minutes. It can actually set up for much longer than that. If you forgot about it, it could sit out for up to an hour. I like to spread the glue beyond the lines, like the whole large sole shape we cut out, because when it comes time to join these two, you never know how it's going to lay down. It might go outside of the lines a bit so it's just better to have a large area to work with, especially in the link. When spreading glue on the bottom of your uppers, it's really important to get it all the way to the edge. The edge is the most important part. Like you could even skimp on the inside, but the edge needs glue. 18. Joining and Hammering Sole: You're ready to join your upper with the sole. It's really important to give the sole a little bit of rock, like this. Because you really want a little toe spring. If you don't have it, you end up with a real Flintstone foot, a really flat foot that might even cause you to trip. You want these curves. Where is my left? Here it is. The way I like to do it, I hover it above. I actually skewed it a little bit forward more than you think, like a little beyond the line, and then I bring the sole up to hit. Then I start to roll it back, giving plenty of toe curve there, maybe like a half-inch toe curve. As you go back, make sure these parts are snug, and not gaping, and making a big gap there. Here you roll it back. I'm making sure it's aligned with my plan, and not going askew right or left and then I'll give the heel also just a little bend, like that. I get to go around and really press with my fingertips and really connect each spot. This is contact cement so as soon as it joins, its joined. You can't pull it up and redo it. If you were to make a mistake and need to pull it up, you might need to pull it up with a pliers, because it's a really strong glue, and then you'd need to reapply the glue, wait again, and then join it. There's my first one. Again, I'll give it some rock, and then I think I'll hammer around the whole perimeter with my hammer, and I'll slip it under the shoe and go and hammer here too. When you hammer around the outer edge, just be sure that the upper is folded away from the hammer. I'm hammering pretty delicately, just enough to really connect these two wares, but I don't want to make a huge dent in it. 19. Finishing: At this phase, you have a choice. If you have a table sander or know someone who has one, you can do a fairly sloppy job trimming the rubber off and then just send it on the table sander and you'll have perfect edges. If you don't have access to a table sander, and they're only about a $100, and I love mine, so I recommend getting one. But if you don't plan on getting one, this is the phase where you want to do a really good job trimming it. To do that, I'll demonstrate how you would trim it the best possible way without a sander. Again, I'm going to work in my lap with my legs crossed so that my work is pretty close to me, and I'm going to get a really sharp blade and roll it out about three blades long, and I'm just going to enter the foam rubber, and I want my knife to be parallel to that leather sole. I'm going to try to drag my knife around the entire thing without hesitating too much and get it all off in one cut, although, I'll take my time, but instead of a lot of little cuts which would leave it looking mangled. I'm pressing it against my body, and again, pulling the upper out of the way. This is your final product and as you can see the edge, every time I hesitate, there's a little bit of a line. But it's not really a big deal, it's pretty smooth. The heel and the toe are the more difficult areas to cut, I'd say. But if your blade is sharp enough, you can totally do this really easily. Once you have trimmed off the excess foam rubber from your soles, they're starting to look like shoes you would wear. I still am left with a little bit of a line from my original tracing. So I want to take that off and I like to use a combination of the knife and the scissors. I think scissors are easier for the curves and knives are easier for the inside curves. I'll show you what I mean. Yet again, I'm going to work in my lap close to my body, and I'm just babbling the edge with a knife, not taking too much off, just getting rid of that line. I'm going to punch the holes and I'm just going to eyeball these. I know I want one hole in each corner. So I get one there, and putting a scrap on the back of the hole punch helps to protect the tool and also it helps the hole go through the first layer of leather and through, and so it doesn't leave a hairy half cut piece behind it, you know what i I mean. I usually cut them a bit long and then trim them down to size. I'll start there. Now, it's time to try them on, so the moment of truth. Hello. Now, I'm going to try my shoes with the laces I just cut. I love it. Wonderful. I'm really relieved and happy that they fit, and I'm actually happy with the lace length. I might trim just a little bit off, but I'm very pleased. 20. Final Thoughts+: Well, my shoes fit well, and I'm really happy with them and I hope that you have completed yours and we will share a picture of her shoes with me, so we can talk about the process and share more tips and things like that. Thank you for joining me in making a pair of sandals, I hope that they turned out great, and I really hope you share photos of the entire process, but especially the finish product with me online on Sculpture, and just to go over it again, these were the ones we intended to make, and these are the ones that we made today, and they're identical, but you really can, once you've made this basic shoe, do so many variations on sole shape, strap placement, so on and so on. You can add a strap that buckles or closes with the stud. You can use these principles to start building up into a closed [inaudible] shoe potentially. All sorts of things are possible. Thanks for following along so diligently.