This Weekend's Project: Boots

I've had to revisit some past projects in order to proceed with a new one. This one is a boot, particularly one with a higher heel and cloth composition. This continues my trend of converting away from pure paper derivatives and to more practical means and materials.

I had to dig out the old shoe pattern I used a year and a half ago to dress Hotaru up. The pattern consists of a 34x12mm rectangular object with rounds to better represent a shoe. There's small 2mm dia cylinders stuffed to give the sole its shape.

In this picture, I've already completed construction of the two soles. The top is the side view of the newer one, with 4mm dia cylinders to boost the height of the boot. You can see the round curve that comprises the bottom of the sole sandwiching the cylinders to the top.

For the next part, I had to sew some "socks". Sewing socks consists of me wrapping cloth around the leg, then sewing together the ends to form a tube. Crude, but it works. This part gets hot glued to the Magic: the Gathering boot sole, since no other adhesive works for fabric except fabric glue that I don't have. The left image shows a layer of 110lb cardstock wrapped around the side to cover up the understructure. This uses hot glue since I wanted a fast cure time and the thin layers would be painful to make sure the glue adhered well. The bottom parts are 10mm long bamboo sticks made conical to function as the heels. These will be glued with Loc-Tite super glue, since hot glue isn't good for shear loads.

Here is the finished construction of the boot in use. I will paint them red or some color other than white. I'm leaning towards enamels for a better "water proof" coat, in the event that it may suffer some minor moisture. The boot will NOT survive water, and will likely mush up the soles if submerged for a few minutes. I could theoretically submit one prototype to life testing to find out....