Shalom. I’m taking an online sneaker deconstruction/reconstruction class from the Shoe Surgeon and am documenting the process as I go. If you missed the first three parts of this series you can check Part 1 out here, Part 2 here and Part 3 here.
Days 18-23, Part 1: Flipping the Liner and Punching Perforations
At the end of Part 3 I had just finished bonding the Heel Liner to the Main Base to create the upper of my Air Jordan 1.
After bonding comes – you guessed it – sewing. At this point I only sew the Main Base to the Heel Liner at the Upper Eyelets. The Main Base will be sewed to the Heel Liner in various other places as we go through the process of closing the shoe up.
It’s now time to reinforce the Main Base to the Heel Liner through the Quarters by way of the Security Stitch. Sorry if this whole beginning section has been confusing with the terminology. I’m such a Shoe Dog now that the lingo just flows out of me. I’m pretty cool, if you didn’t know. The coolest people always talk about how cool they are. It’s cool to confuse the h3ll out of people.
Quickly: the Main Base is the piece of material you build the upper upon, the Heel Liner is the inside of the shoe and the Eyelets are the pieces of leather the laces go through. Hope this illuminates to some degree. Just look at the pictures, for G@d’s sake.
Basically I’m trying to say I sewed a line through the Quarters to reinforce them to the Main Base. If you look at a standard pair of AJ1s you’ll see this stitch V through the Swooshes, like this.
To finish the Eyelet row, it’s now time to bond (tape) the Lower Eyelets and sew them on. The next few steps don’t take much time to execute. Things are happening fast.
As you can see above, I also punched out the lace holes and holes in the “roof” of the Toe Box. The last thing we need is poorly ventilated, stinky feet. I grabbed a hole punch, a rubber head hammer and a cutting board. Sounds like the start of one of the Gimp scenes from Pulp Fiction. As I bang away on the pre-marked hole punch spots, I can hear my family scrambling upstairs, asking each other if someone is trying to break into our house. No, people, I’m just making shoes in the basement. This episode gets me thinking that we all need to get out more. I might cry the first time I have brunch at a restaurant again.
I cut away the excess Heel Liner along the Eyelets, too. You have to keep the lower excess Liner until you attach the Toe Box and close the shoe (which is next, oh boy!).
Days 18-23, Part 2: Attaching the Tongue and Closing the Shoe
Before you can close the shoe you have to make the Tongue and sew it to the Toe Box. This is another wonderful opportunity to take six months off of your life by using the spray glue indoors.
Once I glue the Tongue Foam to the Tongue Liner and then glue the Tongue leather on top, it’s time to sew the Tongue closed and stop saying “Tongue” so much.
The Tongue is an opportunity for some fun detail. I am instructed to sew two accent stitches across the top and then cut slits in the middle for the laces to feed through. The Shoe Surgeon also shows you how to sew a Tongue Tag on, but I go rogue and decide to do my own. I create a tiny swoosh pattern by finding a google image on my phone, turning the brightness all the way up and tracing a pattern onto a thicker cardstock. I cut the pattern out carefully. After tracing the patterns on pink leather I badly cut out tiny pink Swooshes. The degree of difficulty is high due to my fat fingers and the smallness of the pieces, but I think it came out okay (seeing it from afar, at least). I had to settle for only gluing the Swooshes on since they are too small to sew, in my very unprofessional opinion.
It’s worth mentioning that you don’t have to go the detail-free route that I did. Other people in my class peer group have shown some really cool stuff. A few people put stitching accents along their upper Collars. One guy has some sort of pressing machine with Air Jordan Wings stamps that can either stamp the leather directly or melt colored foil on it. One lady put a super-sharp and professional looking soccer club logo on her tongues and plans to use her hand-made kicks for game day. Another lady somehow stitched gold chains as piping around her Swooshes. I don’t know how she didn’t destroy her needles doing that, but it looks good.
As you can see in the pic above (green strips at the bottom), the Tongue gets bonded to the Toe Box with the double sided tape. Then I sew it on and, Hot D@mn, I’m almost ready to close this sucker up.
To close the shoe you have to, once again, bond before you sew. I use some double sided tape on the inside of the Lower Eyelet to stick one side in there (did medial side first, or the inside of the foot on each shoe). Then I sewed the one remaining line in the Lower Eyelet that was left open for this very purpose.
Getting the shoe closed is a little tricky because it’s tough to control the folding of the shoe while trying to bond the other side at the same time. Fortunately I have large binder clips and proclivity to clamp sh!t.
The clamp made it downright easy to bond the remaining side together. It took a bit of swearing and negotiation to get this big bulky piece around the sewing machine to get this thing closed up, but I did it.
Apparently the Shoe Surgeon Shoe School has a tradition that, when you close your uppers, you are required to wear the d@mn thing as a hat. Who am I to buck tradition?
The Shoe School schedule allows multiple days for a bunch of the steps I’ve just gone through above. This is good and bad. It’s good because I haven’t had to scramble to get any one step done (not that there is any penalty for being late). It’s bad because there have been a few steps that have gone quickly, leaving me a few days to wait until the next lesson unlocks.
That’s where I find myself at this point. I have two closed uppers and nowhere to go. At least I can wear them at hats and stare longingly at my sewing machine for a few days.
The next post will be the last in the Sneaker School series. I should have a finished, wearable shoe by then. Very excited.
Until then take it sleazy, Shoe Dogs.
-MG
