Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
I have some wool felt house shoes that I love. Most Americans would call them slippers, I suppose. Comfortable as all get out. The problem is that the soles wear through.
I've got a recycled wool felt horse blanket. I can cut new soles out of the felt. But how would be best to attach them to the old soles? I don't think I want the trouble of remaking the whole shoe - I'm working by hand as I don't have a machine that would go through this. The original felt is maybe 1/4", the felt on the blanket is over 1/2". Should I:
1. Just take it down to a local shoe repair and have them sew it
2. Try to sew it by hand
3. Use traditional contact cement, or
4. Use a product like shoe goo.
Using the cement or the shoe goo, I'm concerned that the glue will just penetrate the felt, and end up ineffective and uncomfortable.
I would think the shoe repair can't sew something this thick any more than I can. Can they? The horse blanket manufacturers sew the horse blanket together. Doing it by hand, I'd have to use an awl to punch through every hole, I imagine.
The local boot repair I use has equipment plenty heavy to do just about any kind of shoe repair. You may have to look around a little, but I think repair is well worth the price instead of buying new especially when you can't find an exact replacement.
Sew it by hand nless you plan to buy a heavy treadle operated sewing machine. Shoe repair will be very difficult with no electric grid; learn now. Sears catalogs from the period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries list many cobbling items so we know that people, particularly in rural areas, repaired their own shoes and boots.
A cobbler's last is a great help. I just found the one below on ebay. There are older books that discuss this. I know that I have at least one, but it's wandering around my lair at the present time. Start looking on your computer while the internet still exists. ebay is a good source of old equipment as well as older books.
When the grid goes down you'll certainly want to stay on your retreat as disease will run rampant. When the population is a tenth of what it is today you may have trouble finding a cobbler.
Probably the easiest would be to sew them on by hand. There's that wooden handle with a needle on the end - what are those things called? Ah, it's a sewing awl. They're not very expensive and they're easy to use and you'd still have the tool afterwards.
After you fix your slippers, you can sew up saddles, leather bags, canvas of all types and pretty much any heavy fabric. You'll have lots of horse blanket left, you can make more slippers out of the left over bits. It's easy to felt many wools, too, to put on the inside to keep them comfy.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
