Latest hiking sandals

One more pair of sandals made. I have tried everything and this is the culmination of every test. This has all the elements of a good hiking sandal.

This style of sandal is stable uphill or down and on side slopes. Huaraches hurt between the toe and are not stable. Huaraches also require a lot of retying and tightening. Theses do not.

Most tab sandals like these have a closed heel. An open heel is better for hiking because I get pebbles stuck under my feet and it's easiest to roll them out the back. Other sandals I made like this with a closed heel caused chafing on the heel. It can be hard to get the heel stiff enough to prevent chafing.

The soles are Vibram Newporters. They wear long and have good traction on wet rocks. The traction on trails is pretty good. Sometimes pebbles get stuck in the tread, as does mud and dog poop. But the tread is best of all the products available to me.

There is 1/4 inch of "cloud" cushioning between the sole and the upper leather. Padding lets me hike fast without having to run. Minimalism is fun but it is not fast. I can handle the sharpest rocks with this combination.

The surface is suede. Suede can be slippery when wet. But the lacing is stable so this should not be an issue.

The whole upper is leather because leather is easier to work with and leaves no rough edges to chafe like nylon webbing can. Being sandals, it should not be a problem to get them wet. They'll dry fast enough and my feet can breathe.

The only issue is lack of protection for socks in areas with foxtails and stickers. I may see if I can make a sock cover for that situation.

I took them for a walk. They're great. I really like them. I look forward to hiking in them next weekend.

I'm almost out of shoemaking supplies and I'm thinking that these sandals are as far as I want to go with it. I think I'm done making shoes for a while.

Homemade yogurt

I made some homemade yogurt. It came out GREAT! Wow! So creamy and sweet.

I used raw milk. I heated it to 175 degrees on a double-boiler and let it cool to 100 degrees after removing from the stove. It took about an hour to cool to 100 degrees. I poured the milk into a glass jar. I mixed about 2-3 spoonfuls of plain yogurt mixed with a little milk and poured it into the glass jar. I then wrapped the jar in a towel and put it in the oven with the light on. I thought I remembered that the light in our oven doesn't put out much or any heat, so I had preheated the oven to 200 degrees and turned it off long before the milk had cooled. When I put the jar in the oven, it was only slightly warm.

I left this overnight and in the morning it was yogurt! It seemed a little liquid, but after I refrigerated it for the day, it was the consistency of french yogurt and tasted just as good! I plan to try it with pasteurized milk to see if it comes out as good as raw milk.

The secret of the PCT

As I drove home from my 5 day section hike of the PCT, the one where I endured mostly misery and terrible weather, I thought about the secret that the PCT showed me.

Our whole culture that we normally live teaches us to be concerned with three things: Comfort, security and status. It tells us the more of those things we have the happier we will be. The PCT turns all of that on its head and instead says that the less of those things we need the happier we are.

Comfort
The PCT shows you how little you need to be comfortable. You need only to stay warm and dry and to eat, have enough water and a safe place to sleep. Anything more than that is luxury.

I remember when I was hiking toward a planned hiker feed in northern California. I and the two people I was with that day were hurrying, hoping to make it in time for the food. It became clear that we were probably going to be too late for the food, so we hoped there might be some leftovers. It became clear that we'd probably be late for even leftovers so we hoped there might still be chairs. Chairs! We worked ourselves into a rapture of desire over the thought of sitting in chairs. When we got there the hiker feed was gone, but there were chairs and apples. We were in heaven.

Hiking the PCT makes the tiniest things into enormous pleasures. A chair becomes a dream come true. A cup is a luxury that gives you fits of pleasure. The secret to happiness is not to have more. It is to have less. The less you have the more happiness you feel because little things bring you happiness beyond measure. In our culture we have too much and so endure a sort of law of diminishing returns where we keep trying to add things to gain happiness but find happiness eludes us. This is one of the big secrets the PCT teaches. Comforts should be minimal for maximum happiness.

Security
Our modern world is obsessed with security on many levels. The most common level is the day-to-day preoccupation of securing enough money to afford a decent life. It takes a lot of work and a lot of money and you are never quite sure you've done enough to have made your life secure.

The PCT strips away most security from you. You are left only with a bag of stuff on your back and your wits. That stuff and your resourcefulness become your security. Your body becomes strong from strenuous exercise and you are able to do things you never thought possible. A marathon becomes an easy distance. Your resourcefulness tells you that you can fashion chopsticks from sticks if you lose your eating utensil. You can make a rain poncho from your ground sheet. You can just hike a few more hours or days to a shelter if needed. Your tools and your feet can keep you safe under most conditions.

On the PCT you walk through many different kinds of landscapes. No matter how austere the landscape, it is filled with living things. All these living things are meeting their needs for life. Nature is giving them what they need. There is no landscape that is worthless because it brings life to whatever is living in it.

You almost become a part of the landscape and the economic system that the creatures in it are living under. There is the phenomenon of trail magic, which I believe is the energy of the universe that governs the living things of nature. This magic force wants you to live and it shows you its benevolence by giving you the things you need when you need it. It is another economy outside the one we have built of money and greed. It is the economy of life, of love. Some people call it the Gift Economy where everything is freely given.

In the economy of money and greed, we never have enough. The things that give us life become mundane and taken for granted. You turn a knob and water comes out of a faucet. There is no wonder or gratitude. When you walk 20 or 30 miles in the hot sun to a spring flowing out of the ground, water becomes life embodied and you feel love and gratitude for the water. The universe wants you to be alive and it provides water. It is freely given.

I think often about the horrible things we do to the earth. The plastic filling the seas, the fracking destroying the water for a few minutes of energy and money. When we turn to money for our security we separate ourselves from the source of our true security. Hiking the PCT brings us closer to the source. You do not have to reach and grab to get what you need. You only need to walk quietly and you'll reach the next stream, the next town. Water and food will be waiting for you. We learn there is a hole in the fence of this prison we live in daily and on the other side is a different world. One of love and wonder, beauty and freedom, happiness, struggle, pain and pleasure. It asks only that we live fully and that we walk.

The PCT takes you through places that only hikers and hobos will ever see. Only a hiker or a hobo or perhaps a swallow can see a culvert under a freeway as a safe place to sleep. Only a hiker or a hobo or perhaps other woodland creatures will feel the safety and security of sleeping under a tree in the middle of nowhere. When you can sleep anywhere, the whole world becomes your home. You can never be homeless.

All of this makes you aware that we worry too much about the future. The PCT calms the fear that rises up in our daily lives that we won't have enough, that we'll lose everything, end up on the streets. There's a 2663 mile long unpaved, single track street waiting for you to call home. You carry inside your pocket the key to that street like a secret and it burns a warm secure feeling inside you.

Status
On a long distance hike you meet people with made-up names. You don't know their real names or what they do for a living. The rankings of ordinary life go away. Being the kind of people we are, there still are ways to rank each other on the trail, but largely you are free from the status you came with. You can camp with someone of a far lower or higher social status than you and not even know it. The skills needed out there are different than the skills needed in society and it levels the field a bit. It's freeing.

At the start of a thru-hike people are very much concerned with their gear. How light is it? Do you have enough of it? What brand is it? As you go along, you realize your gear is just a tool. Everything you own is just a tool. Your possessions are only worth as much as the service they provide you. If they aren't providing any service, they are not worth anything. An aluminum can may provide as much utility as a $300 sleeping bag. Your expensive shoes may be destroying your feet and the cheap ones might be saving them. The money or brand name isn't what is important. What's important is the usefulness of the object and your skills.

PCT hikers are never truly outside society. (If anything, it is only because of our society that we can even do such a thing as hike the PCT.) We still need money. We still carry food bought in stores. Our gear is made with plastics and things that couldn't have existed without industrial society and made in processes that pollute the planet. We aren't at one with nature. We're just passing through. But we touch the edge of a world where you can just be and don't have to prove, and it feels good.

On the trail you learn that your body is strong. You can walk a long way. You can endure scary things. You can make it through a difficult night of bad weather. You can solve problems. It brings a sense of calm, a sense of pride. Next time someone treats you poorly you can see right through the attempt that person is making to position himself above you and it just doesn't work. You carry a secret inside of you. You can walk 2663 miles with very little possessions and endure hardships and still be comfortable, warm, safe and dry. You have the key to happiness and nobody can take it away.

This is the secret I learned from the PCT. Having less comfort makes life happier and full of luxury. Security is not fully dependent on money. The kinds of status modern society bids you to seek are irrelevant. Whenever the cold sweats come in the middle of the night, when you think of your future and how you don't have the millions of dollars the financial experts say you need to survive your old age, you can think of the trail, of the birds and other living things. They have no insurance. They have no portfolios. Yet they live in beauty that even then richest man on earth will never see. They have not hoarded and saved for the future and instead live in the present and let nature care for them. You can think of Billy Goat still hiking the trail in his old age. You can remember the hardships you endured and the priceless treasures you saw that can't be bought and you realize that somehow, everything will be okay.

One-button moccasins

My latest homemade shoe. A one-button moccasin shoe.

The leaf pattern disguises a means to attach my dirty girl gaiters.

This leather was hard to work with. It is not very soft or stretchy. The pull loops on the heels really dig into my heels. But wearing them around a little bit seems to be softening them up and I think in the end they'll end up being really comfortable.

It took me a lot of attempts to make these. I bought a CD on how to make these kinds of boots from scratch starting with taping up your foot to make the patterns. I did all that but the patterns were too tight, too small. The resulting shoe could not be put on and cut against my ankle. I tried at first to make taller boots but after they dug so deeply into my leg, I cut them shorter. That didn't work at all. Only made them worse. They were ruined. I suppose next time I try this I will put on really thick socks before making the pattern, then add 3 times as much seam allowance to compensate for my hatred of my shoes touching my toes, and then I'll use much softer leather.

I have a whole side (of the cow) of this reddish leather, so I started over with my patterns that I bought and modified from Simple Shoemaking, thinking that maybe my tried-and-true patterns would be more friendly with this leather. I tried to copy some of what I could see on Shoemaker Sharon's site. I'm not very creative so even though I would look at her shoes, it was impossible for me to actually copy how she made them. I have to have a pattern, I guess. Anyway, I got the idea for the leaf pattern from her.

I know I make shoes completely wrong. For example, I stitched the uppers directly to some rubber soling sheet instead of to more leather. The CD instructions had me stitching to two layers of leather. This made the seams really thick. I probably should have stitched to one layer of leather for the insole, but I thought maybe I might try to sell the rest of this leather. Hmm, now I'm regretting not doing it right and sewing them to leather. Oh well. Maybe next time.

Anyway, I'm pretty happy with how they turned out. I wish I had a sewing machine so that my stitches would come out smaller and nicer, but I think they aren't too bad. I look forward to gluing on the sole and wearing them and getting them broken in so they don't look so stiff and shiny.

Chaco "shoes"

So, since I found out that Chacos makes shoes, ordered some and sent them back for an exchange because they didn't fit, I thought I would take an old pair of Chaco sandals that I had in the closet and staple the uppers from a pair of my homemade shoes to them. The uppers were made from nylon men's bathing trunks. I hammered thick metal staples through the uppers into the sides of the sandals. Works pretty well.

I didn't feel bad about possibly ruining the sandals since these were the ones that were too narrow for my heels, that I cut off the edges of the heels to fit me. They were already crudely modified so what is one more modification.

They're not as comfortable as my homemade hiking shoes. Boy are my homemade shoes fantastic now that I modified them. I feel great knowing I finally made the perfect hiking shoe! Thin sole that's really flexible but just protective enough I don't worry about rocks and things. Flexible so my foot can work like a foot should and thin so I can still feel what the ground actually feels like. With the shoes tapered in toward my arches more, they fit perfectly. I felt really stable on yesterday's off-trail adventure.

These homemade Chaco shoes, in comparison, feel thick and clunky. I suppose I can send back the Chacos I exchanged when they come now that I've made my own. Or I may keep them if they are better than my homemade ones.

Visited my mushroom tree today

Trailhacker and I got a chance to visit the mushroom tree today. I had tried to go there on my birthday last Tuesday but failed. He has four-wheel drive and could drive on the icy road.

There was a lot of snow on the mountains.

The trail had quite a lot of snow on it. It was easy to walk on.

It was really beautiful on the trail. We spent some time sitting in the sun enjoying nature, dreaming of long distance hikes. Trailhacker plans to take 3 weeks off from work and return to the PCT where he left off near Apache Peak and hike to Hikertown. I'm very jealous. I think he wants to do it alone. Maybe I'll do another solo hike sometime this spring or summer, too.

Our mushroom tree had a few mushrooms. There were none in the places where we had found them before. They had popped up in new spots. There were not many.

I went up to the other spot where I found some and found only one, but it was all rotten. I found some interesting white mushrooms, too, so I picked those to take home and see if I could identify them with my new book, Mushrooms Demystified.

On our way back up the trail we found a few more mushrooms and picked them. Most of the snow had already melted, too.

When I got home I spent some time identifying the white mushrooms. Here is a picture of them still in the soil.

The book has a key so I followed the key and identified them as Russula cascadensis. I guess it's technically not poisonous but it was described as tasting "acrid." I guess tasting it is part of identifying it, but I really didn't want to taste something that wouldn't taste good. It was also described as being reviled by mushroom experts. Apparently they like to kick them and crush them. They are very brittle and during one of the identification tests I broke the stem and it exploded in my face. I can see why it might be fun to kick and crush them. But I can't say I revile any mushrooms enough to abuse them.

Too bad they weren't good mushrooms because they looked really good and tasty growing there. They were very fresh looking. Most of the other mushrooms we found, if they weren't frozen solid, were rotted.

I wore my new hiking kilt and my homemade hiking shoes. I imagine I look ridiculous in my crazy hiking stuff. Oh well. I kind of like my hiking shoes. They work quite well. The kilt is fun to hike in. I enjoy hiking in a skirt. I feel like it puts it all into perspective. It's not "Man vs. Wild" out there. It's just walking. I wore silk leggings to protect my legs from poison oak. I had tried capilene previously but capilene sticks to the kilt bunching it up. Silk worked a bit better, bunching up the kilt a bit less. My plan would be to use the kilt for So Cal on the PCT in the future.

When I got home, after identifying the mushrooms, I spent the rest of the afternoon making patterns for another pair of shoes. I am determined to follow the instructions I got on a CD for making fancy moccasins. I sort of feel tired of making shoes, but I really want to try to make these because if I succeed they will have been made from a pattern made from my actual feet, with a pattern specially made for each foot. They ought to fit well and look good. If they work, perhaps I can backpack in them.

The man who sold me the instructions has been helping me and suggested I make them from upholstery fabric the first time around. Well, if upholstery fabric would work, what about some kind of fabric appropriate for hiking shoes? That could turn out really well, be lighter for warm weather than leather.

I've only gotten as far as making the pattern. I haven't even begun to make the actual shoes.

Wild greens for dinner

I collected some wild greens on a hike this weekend. I gathered wild mustard greens and a little bit of miners lettuce. I am going to have this for dinner.

Tab Sandals and weeds

My latest shoe project: 4-Tab Sandals. They are very comfortable and pretty easy to make. I put up a tutorial.

So far homemade shoes and sandals have been my only real getting free item. I have also started learning about edible plants. There are a lot of edible plants that grow as weeds in my back yard. So have no fear that I'm devastating the wilderness. It's more like I found a way to grow food in the garden without working very hard—by eating the weeds instead.

My dinner was half wild

Tonight I made a dinner comprised of wild chanterelle mushrooms and wild mustard greens. I picked both of these on hiking trails. Also in my dinner where spinach, onions and cream. It was a cream soup. It was delicious.

I ordered a book on edible plants and am waiting somewhat impatiently for it to come. That free Amazon shipping takes a long time. I hope to find more greens I can eat. Many of them probably grow as weeds in my yard. Next time I make a soup like this, I hope to substitute some kind of wild greens for the spinach. I could have used miners lettuce except I didn't have a bag when I saw some the other day so I didn't collect any.

Divide Peak and fantasies

Today I did a little hike to Divide Peak. Divide Peak is a peak overlooking the ocean near Murietta Divide. Murietta Divide is the boundary of the watershed between Ojai and Santa Barbara. It is also the same trail I hiked on the first and second day of my 2009 hike from Santa Barbara to the Pacific Crest Trail. I walked right by the place where I slept on my first night of that adventure. It was nice to be back.

At the summit of the hike, we were at the top of 4700-something foot Divide Peak. Peaks and ridges surrounded us all at similar elevations. I was on the Crest once more. Two ravens floated by cawing. For a minute there I felt like I was back on the PCT in the So Cal section. I felt happy and at home. Everybody I was with (and it was a big group) sort of disappeared for a moment and I was back on the trail.

Lately I have been engaging in little escapist fantasies about living in an RV on the road spending all my time touring BLM and forest service lands. I have been wondering if I should get a van so I could have something to live in on the road. I currently own a pickup truck. Maybe I should get a camper shell instead.

It occurred to me today that an amazing adventure could be had with my truck and my backpacking gear. All I would need is my backpack and gear, a box with some extra gear for colder or warmer weather, a box with some extra clothes and a cooler to store some food. So a camper shell would be sufficient.

I could imagine myself parking at the trailhead and hiking up to Murietta Camp to spend the night. Maybe I could set up a stealth camp near the hot spring that was nearby. Backpacking feels so much safer to me than sleeping in a vehicle. Backpacking is respectable behavior. Sleeping in a car is practically illegal, at least around here. I could do this all over the place. Drive a little, hike in and set up my tent, pack it all up in the morning and return to my car, move on. Stay awhile somewhere nice. Do a few days of hiking at a time. What an awesome way to live that would be!

It's a great fantasy. Back to work tomorrow, sadly.

Big Plate 'O 'Shrooms

We went back for more mushrooms. We gave a few to our chef neighbor. It was worth $29 a pound to see the look on his face!

My minimalist shoes

I have a fleet of somewhat minimalist shoes and sandals now. Pictured are the ones I like. All the other ones I made suck in one way or another. These are the good ones.

Except for the strappy sandals which I did not make, I only resoled, they all use basically the same pattern from Simple Shoemaking - the two-piece casual. I made little changes, such as altering whether they are closed-toe or not, altering the decoration across the vamp and heel area, changing the heel piece to cover more of my foot, and changing the materials used for the uppers and the fasteners.

All these shoes lack arch support and are zero-drop, which means no rise in the heel. The heel is the same height as the ball of the foot (except that after a while of walking, the ball of the foot does lower itself a bit.) Some have almost no cushioning and others have thicker soles which provides a little more cushioning. None of them are squishy soft, though. They all have ample toe-box width.

I wear them to work and class, to parties and on hikes. It is a wonderful feeling to wear shoes that don't do things for my feet. I have to walk a little differently and I'm getting used to not having a raised heel. It's strange to see how much that feature has altered the natural functioning of my body over time. It's like learning to walk again in some ways.

It's a wonderful feeling of freedom to have made all these shoes myself. I hope that they serve me well. You see, after my 2008 PCT hike, I left the trail with horrible stress fractures caused by motion control running shoes (specifically Montrail Hardrocks, the good ones before they changed them and everybody decided they sucked.) Those shoes forced my feet into an unnatural position with my toes pointed up to the sky. I hurt the bones at the balls of my feet as they were forced to hit the ground unnaturally with every step. Eventually I had metatarsal stress fractures and was in so much pain and agony I had to leave the trail.

At home I researched online and found these articles about the physical problems shoes can cause. So much of my pain was explained. I walked around barefoot in my neighborhood, bought some huge Keen sandals for work, and tried to heal my feet. It took a long time.

Before my second hike, I made sure to purchase shoes that were flexible rather than stiff and "corrective." This helped a lot, but they were not quite wide enough in the right places so eventually I got other injuries. I found the squishiness of the EVA foam soles to feel okay after miles of pounding on the trail, but in actuality, when I got home and did some test walks in different shoes, I found the squishy foam caused me to feel like I was working a lot harder to cover the same ground. Firmer shoes felt like the energy transfer went directly into forward motion. I think now that softness should be an add-on, something you can stick inside the shoe when needed and removed when not needed.

Long ago I read Ray Jardine and he suggested low-top hiking shoes rather than high-top boots for backpacking. I made that switch and it was like night and day. I was able to use the full range of motion of my legs to power up hills. I never went back. My ankles are strong as tree trunks. I've never hurt them. I think perhaps it is the same for arch support. If I can build strong ankles why not strong arches and strong feet? To do that means eliminating shoe features that try to "help" me. It means minimalist shoes.

No companies make the kind of minimalist shoes I was looking for (I guess they are starting to do that now), so I made my own. I really didn't want gorilla feet Vibram Five Fingers. I had some long ago and I did not like them. Instead I made relatively normal-looking shoes. It's wonderful to have a fleet of them. I like the feeling when I wear them and the feeling of independence having made them. I look forward to seeing what, if any, changes they make to my foot health.

Latest or possibly last homemade shoes

I made another pair of shoes, this time from leather. I think I finally achieved a decent pair of shoes. They feel so comfortable. They fit like a glove. The sole feels wonderful. There is no slipping off the back or any issues with fit at all.

I am going to wear them to a party tonight even though they are totally unprofessional and informal. I don't care. Nobody will see them under my outfit anyway.

I don't think I will make any more shoes for a while. I really like the Vibram Newflex soling material I made these out of. I don't want to ruin it with any more shoe projects that don't work. If I use the Vibram for anything else, it will be to resole some of my existing shoes.

If I do make another pair it will be another one just like these. I have some black leather to make them. It's my last project I had planned. But I don't feel like making anymore shoes. I need to dispose of most of the other shoes I made. None are as good as these. All were part of the learning process, though, so it's not a total waste.

Homemade Ugg boots

I made Ugg-style boots. Upholstery fabric, fleece and scrap fabric liner. I added a seam binding. This is really nice and hides the stitching of the upper to the sole. I will do that in the future if I make any more shoes.

I simply cannot seem to get the heel portion of my shoes right. My foot slides off the back or my heel rises up. If I tie around the ankle that prevents the problem, so I will find something nice to tie around the ankles. It is very discouraging that every pair of shoes seems to have this problem. So, I added a webbing strap inside the boot around my ankle. That seems to work.

They look really good and I am very proud of them.

Retiring early

I found this awesome article on retiring early on Road Junky. Retire with $50,000? I'm nearly there.

Latest homemade shoes

I made these white felt and leather moccasins. They are very ugly, but they look somewhat decent when worn.


I also resoled a pair of old sandals I had. I had brought these to a cobbler once and asked if they could replace the sole and flatten them. They told me that removing the heel would make it impossible to walk. They said they'd be very uncomfortable. So I decided to do it myself.

I turned these:



Into these:



I have to say that they are so much more comfortable now. They feel like I always wanted them to feel but they never did. They are flexible and protective. I finally have a pair of simple sport sandals that fit well and feel good.

I'm so inspired now by the idea of hacking my shoes rather than trying to make them. I am wondering what else in my closet I can hack and improve.

Shoes and whales

I made my last pair of shoes for a while. I finally succeeded at making a pair of hiking shoes. They are polyester fabric for light weight, breathability and quick drying. They have a Vibram hiking boot sole. The blue is flip-flop foam.

I hope to test them on the trails next weekend.

It's totally liberating to be able to make your own shoes. Not just sandals, but shoes. Shoes don't have to be so complicated. They can be really simple. It really bugs me that it is like trying to turn an ocean liner to get shoe companies to do anything different. "Oh no, we can't make zero-drop shoes, people will hurt themselves." "Oh no, we can't make wide shoes, people want their feet to look narrow and pretty." They can go on and on as much as they like now. I'm free of them.

My whale job starts again this week. I will be too busy to make any more shoes. But since finally achieved my goal, I don't need anymore shoes for a while.

I will be listening to whales again. But not much for BP. Seems they were a little too busy last summer to do much exploration. I wish my whale job was my only job. I am not liking my programming job lately.

Tested my homemade sandals on a hike today

I tested my recent homemade hiking sandals, the brown ones with the lug sole.

I really like the lug sole. It has great traction.

I like the wide width of the sandals. With the thin sole, I really did feel almost barefoot.

I didn't like the leather top sole. It's too slippery.

The uppers have stretched out as I've worn them and now feel loose. With the slippery top sole, my foot slides around too much. I can't wear socks with them. I may try to glue on a thin layer of suede.

I think future shoes should have a little padding. These sandals don't have any. I could feel a lot of the rocks through the soles. While it's not really a problem, if I want to hike really fast with others, the lack of padding could slow me down. On the otherhand, for running I think the lack of padding feels ideal.

I think future shoes should be tighter around my arch. I don't need an arch support, but having the upper hug the arch would hold the shoe on better.

I'm getting there. I just wish I had the skills to deliberately carry out the features I want. I kind of feel like every pair I just get lucky if they work or not.

Latest homemade shoe

My latest pair of shoes. A closed-toe sandal made of fabric with a leather sole. It started out as another pair of fisherman's sandals but the right one came out too small so I decided to try a closed toe front instead.

They are a little small for me. I guess the sole tracing I made to the shape of my foot works well for sandals but for shoes it needs to be bigger. And the upper needs to be bigger too. My feet are just so terribly wide. I have to really modify my patterns to fit my duck feet.

I got the plastic buckles and webbing from the hardware store. I stitched the uppers to a thick piece of leather, but under the leather I put a layer of non-stick shelf-liner material. It's sort of like a thin rubber-like material. The plan was to glue a real sole on, and I hoped the shelf-liner would provide a tiny bit of cushion plus a good surface for the glue, but I'm not sure I'm happy with the fit. They fit okay without socks, though.

Update: I couldn't tolerate how tight they were over my toe so I made them into open-toed sandals. They are butt-ugly, I admit, but I'm going to try hiking in them. At least with the open toe, dirt that gets in should be able to be shaken out.

Freedom is found in unusual places

I'm sure all my posts about making my own shoes have been quite boring and annoying. I was reading something online today, a group for barefoot runners. All these people worried about what they can buy to wear on their feet through winter so as to be able to approximate barefoot running without having to be so darn cold. Some people were concerned about having to order all these shoes over the Internet, wasting money trying to find something that would work. I wanted to tell these people to just make a pair of warm, flat shoes to run in!

I feel so free knowing how to make shoes. I am not as dependent as I used to be for something so elemental for my existence. This is incredibly freeing and powerful. Yeah, I still have to buy stuff, I still have to spend time making it, but I can make what I need. I don't have to depend on a capricious market that doesn't even make what I need. It's so incredibly empowering.

That is why I've been posting all my shoe projects under the topic of getting free.