Alright, I got around to finishing these off.
So, first cut your soles and the pieces of your uppers from leather! I used approx 9 oz for the soles, and 3-4 oz for the uppers. Once the sole is cut out, punch a gazillion holes around the perimeter of the sole using your awl. A diamond shaped awl and some bees wax makes this infinitely easier than trying to use a round awl. Thank you Sir Humphrey for the diamond shaped blade!!! Make sure your holes are evenly spaced and repeatable to that they match up with the holes you will punch on the uppers! The flesh side is what you see in the photo, and that's what your foot will touch. The grain side will be in contact with the ground. It is important to note that the awl passes through the flesh side of the leather and out the EDGE of the leather, do not punch a hole all the way through or you will be walking on your stitches and they will fail prematurely.
My uppers are in two parts, so they had to be stitched together. The two pieces of leather are butted together and then you run two threads simultaneously. The needle passes through the flesh side and out the EDGE of the leather so that the stitches will not be visible on the outer surface when the shoe is turned.
Here's the upper prior to punching holes around the perimeter.
On the upper, the perimeter holes pass straight through the leather from the flesh side to the grain side. Once it's all sewn together you have an inside out shoe that fits on the wrong foot! Try it on and make sure it fits before you go any further!
The shoe's sole is too stiff to flip the shoe inside out. To turn the shoe you must soak it in water for a couple minutes. The leather will now be extremely pliable. You can see that the leather loses all of it's shape. After I turned the shoe (hence turnshoe btw
) I put it on to help reshape it, then set it aside to dry.
After the shoe dries, the leather will shrink and tighten up, but the result should be a shoe-shaped object!
Next step was dying the shoe. You can certainly dye the upper before assembly as well. It will make for a better looking finished product because there won't be any spots hard to reach with the dye like there are when the shoe is put together. Note how puffy the wet shoe next to the dyed shoe is, you can really see the size difference that the water makes, and how it resumes its proper shape when dry. I did 3 coats of dye on each shoe btw to get it even.
You can see here the dye will lighten up as it dries. Then punch holes for the laces, trim off any excess overlapping leather and you have a simple 14th c turnshoe! Congrats, you're a cordwainer now! The shoes is NOT slippery on grass as the sole is nice and supple. It's very much like walking barefoot. I feel very similar to wearing my goofy vibram five-finger toe shoes when wearing my turnshoes.
