Shoe care kit

I like many people appreciate good shoes recently I purchased a pair of hand made shoes by Loake and soon after had a chance to purchase a second pair at a fantastic price. So I now have two pairs of fine shoes and want to look after them.

Here is the kit I have acquired so far.

To keep everything together I need some sort of case, Artists grey board is my design tool of choice.

I marked fold edges a small clearance then the holes for the tins of polish. (I freely admit there is an error here the clearance was to small.)

After bending the edges I added some what I would call framing (engineering background).

I cut some strips of board which I then formed into rings my first idea was to wrap the strips in suede and then form the rings. In the past I have done this and the inside of the suede has wrinkled. This time I formed the rings and then wrapped them in suede.

The suede is electric blue if anyone is interested.

Three rings formed and wrapped I then cut some bases which I also covered in suede.

I glued the suede to the grey board and left it to dry.

While the glue was drying I turned my attention to the shoe horn which was a free gift with the polish.

I wet moulded the leather to the shoe horn and glued it in place more waiting. The I marked the holes for the stitching.

Back to the main body I made a test piece before I started cutting the suede to see how easy it would be to get the suede to fold over the inside edges.

Once I worked out how I was going to do it, It was pretty straightforward. At this point it would have been great to have more clearance at the edges. Remember that mistake this is where it bit.

This is where I discovered my second error I wanted the holes to be tight and had allowed for the thickness of the suede but only once. The tins were a tight fit removing the labels from the sides of the tin fixed that.

Dry fitting the rings and their bases.

The base is now finished I just need to make the rest of the case. My current thoughts are that the base will be fixed to the bottom and the sides will open out with the brushes and shoe horn attached to the sides.

#Leathercraft #Handmade #Bespoke #Customcase #Leather #leathercase #Leatherwork