Making Simple Prehistoric-style Leather Shoes

Hello, I'm Sally Poynter. Today I'm making myself a new pair of shoes to wear with my prehistoric inspired costume. Now these are the current old pair, they're lovely and well worn in on the top but if you have a look at the soles you can see how very very worn out they are. I put in an extra insole to tide me over for another few shows but they're really past saving now. Now like a lot of my prehistoric outfits there's a huge amount of conjecture that goes into how these things are made. We really do only have a very small amount of evidence about actual prehistoric shoes so I will be drawing on the known evidence but there's also going to be a healthy dose of well just what works for my particular feet and my particular materials. So this is the oldest shoe currently in existence or the oldest leather shoe I should say because there are some plant fiber sandals over in the Americas. So this is the Arini One shoe it was found in 2008 in Armenia during an excavation by the Department of Archaeology at University College of Cork in Ireland and it's approximately five and a half thousand years old which makes it probably two or three hundred years older than the Ertzi shoe. It's an amazing piece of preservation it's probably about a UK size six which is a 37 euro or US seven I think. So it's essentially a lady's or an adolescent size probably a very simple construction but really very very practical. There's a good overview of footwear patterns through time in this book Archaeological Footwear Mykita Vulcan and very very briefly some of the other styles it talks about are the Ertzi One and this particular style is one that was found on a glacier and whilst they're very very different you can see that the sole in both cases is very much essentially an oval style so there's no separate sole sewn to an upper in these cases it's very straightforward cutting styles the Ertzi One of course does have plant fiber cordage and bearskin attached but it's that basic the sole piece just wraps around the sides and the cutting patterns for those have been simplified here this is the base of the Ertzi One so your foot goes there and the sides just wrap up this is the one from the glacier it's a slightly more truncated oval where this becomes the seam at the back and if you think about the Armenian one that has a very similar structure to this although I think there's a little bit of trimming that's gone into it so we're going to draw on all of this and see what we can come up with for ours. So the first thing I need to do is take a very basic pattern of my foot so I've got a sheet of brown paper I've got my feet and I've got a pen so all I'm going to do is have a good wriggle lots of rustling it's quite important not to scrunch your feet up when you do this to make sure you get your most spread out foot shape and I'm just going to draw around my foot and that shows me where to place my foot when I make adjustments to this so you can see that I've worked in big flat squashy shoes for a lot of years and I've got big flat squashy feet but that's all right it doesn't matter so the next thing we need to do is allow for the fact that we want the shoes to bend up around the foot and the easiest way to do this is to put your foot back on your template bring the sides of your paper up and pretty much just work out where it's going to take to get to about the middle of your foot don't worry about it being perfect yet we're going to equalize it but just bring it up a bit at a time make a little mark and you can see how this is giving us a sense of how much leather we're going to need to do this I'm going to do the same at the heel I know how high up on my heel I need this to come I know where I want it to come on my ankle bone I know roughly where I want the shoe to tie off and I move my foot again so you can see what's going on here what's happened is we've ended up with a curve here and I think that's probably there in the Armenian one I haven't actually seen any analysis of it laid out flat but this pass shape is pretty much what tends to happen with my versions of this now there's two ways to approach the back I quite often fold the back of mine up I sort of origami it up that's not exactly what you see in the originals the originals tend to go more for it's not quite stretched off like that they tend to cut more like this and then you sew up the sides so it is a matter of preference but I tend to find on the surfaces that I walk on that anything I can do to avoid a seam that rubs or anything with little gaps that might let in dust and dirt and bits of gravel works fairly well for me so yeah I might go for this we'll we'll see how it goes out so when you've got your basic pattern double check a couple of key points I can see those are slightly off at a tangent so maybe there is better looks a little bit more it will get my sides pretty much come up to the same point with the toe here if my leather's nice and soft I can do a gathering right onto the toe if the leather's going to be fairly firm what might actually be better is to do something a like this and sew the toe section up so there's there's several ways of approaching this so mine I think the leather I'm going to be using is going to be quite soft so I am going to go with this essentially sub oval variation so I'm going to tidy that up so that you can see what my pattern looks like and then we'll choose some leather your choice of leather is relatively important now those Armenian shoes they've analysed as being a thin cowhide and that's a really good choice mine today are probably going to be in goat skin which is very thin and has enough stretch to be comfortable but isn't over stretchy I did a while ago make some in deer skin and you can probably even see on the video just how much stretchier that is and I personally found deer skin too stretchy for my taste so do bear that in mind when you're choosing leather now the direction of cut is also relatively important if you think about how the leather sat when it was on the animal and how the different muscles work you're going to have stretch in different areas so most of us are going to have to cut for economy but what you don't want to do is put one piece on that way and one piece on that way unless you have no choice because the odds are you're going to get a very different amount of stretch so I will be going for something that makes the best use of my hide I'll cut one on this side then although it's essentially an identical pattern I'll flip it over and I'll cut the other piece from the other side roughly the same position on the hide and then hopefully the strain will be equal so I'm just going to draw around that with a very very fine line that hardly shows I'll cut it out then we'll sew it up and here's my pattern pieces so I've just cut those out they're mirror images of each other even though they're essentially identical I've also cut out two very thin thongs which I'm going to use to work up the back so the next thing I need to do is find a small ball or chisel to make some slots in the back and we'll lace up the heels so something like that should be fine and we're just going to lace these up a little bit like lacing up a pair of sneakers so leaving just enough at the top to tie off later I'm going down to the bottom hole on the other side and then we'll just spiral around so into this one up through that one into this one up through that one and hopefully that will do the trick and when you reach the top we're just going to knot that off on the inside the spare piece runs up and almost cushions the seam just make sure you've got no twists in your thonging and that'll make sure that it's comfortable the shoe can have a quick try on now so you can see that the heel sitting right back is going to make a tiny little turn at the bottom that's that's normal you see that in surviving examples and then you can just double check that everything is going to line up so we've got a nice match there a little bit less on the top plenty of room to bring the bottom section up what I'm going to do I think is start by threading some needles I'm going to use a linen thread I think for this particular patch so I'm going to use a nice strong cord to represent a bit of plant fibre just for a bit of variety I'm going to do a little bit of running stitch along here so that I can pull up the toe and then we'll lace the rest together just the very top part of the toe has been given a running stitch I'm now going to pull that up really tightly and we'll see how it fits over the foot looking at that I think a bit more to be gathered I think if I gather it around to about there might be better let's try it that's much better so you can see that pulled up that is now enough to properly cover the toe area so what I'm going to do is I'm going to tie that off I'm just literally going to knot these two ends together making sure it's pulled as tightly as I can and then I'm going to crisscross make cross stitches going up sort of pleating this down little as I go so it's going to bring the rest of this fullness in onto the top of the foot so I've played around with this a bit and the way I've decided to do this particular pair is I've extended the running stitch up the sides I'm going to very slightly tighten that to give me the gathers and then I'm going to cross stitch back on myself to close the gap and for this particular pair I think that's going to do the trick very nicely it's all lumpy bumpy at the moment that will come right incidentally they think there's evidence that humans have been wearing shoes for at least 40,000 years now there was some skeletal studies done on a cave site I think it was near Peking and they've managed to show that changes in things like how the toe bones sit and knock-on effects into the leg bones indicates that people are covering their feet which alters the way you walk so even if we haven't got really really early shoes it's amazing these little tiny bits of evidence come through and we're ready for first stage trying on so they do basically fit and these would work however you can see there's a bit of sagginess at the back there so there's a little bit of fullness here now there's several things we could do about this I could adjust the back seam but I think it's actually going to be easier to adjust these from the front so I'm going to give them a really good wiggle and I'm going to work out what I need and actually look it's another little plate at the front there so I need to do just a little bit more of this gathering and cross stitching just to take in another little bit at the front and that should resolve most of the sagginess and then I think just a little bit of lacing to help tie it onto the foot and we'll be ready to wet block it so this sort of shoe is very much a do a bit try it on I've got exactly the same thing here and I can resolve that by bringing the material forwards so don't be afraid to experiment with these and keep adjusting as you go along we're on the home stretch with these now I've punched some holes right around the edge and I'm going to thread some more thongs through so that we can tighten things up hopefully you can see how much more that lacing at the ankle makes everything fit so these are wearable now but I'm going to improve them by running them under the tap getting them really wet and then putting them on making sure they're smoothed really nicely into shape and wearing them whilst they dry out a little bit so up until this point these have been fairly reversible in terms of right and left but now wearing them in you're going to see probably from the damp spots there you are just how they're now going to model themselves exactly to the foot that's wearing them so I'm just going to wear these until they're dry enough to take off you can see how much more smoothly they've settled in to shape all those wriggles and lumps and bumps have pretty much resolved themselves even though they're damp they're really really comfortable and you can tell from the footprints that although they give you your feet protection they're really not getting in the way of you feeling the floor beneath you so we'll let those dry and those I think are ready for my next adventure there we go all done they can finish drying out quietly and you can really see how they've taken on the shape of the foot now