Have you ever thought about making your own shoes or boots?

Normally, in these days of mass-produced everything it is actually not worth the trouble to do something like this unless there are some very special circumstances involved.

Maybe you just want to do it. If so, the time spent & materials and tools bought for making a pair of shoes or boots are immaterial. If this is the case, GO FOR IT.

You may also want to have a very specific kind of shoe or boot that you cannot find on the shelf of your local shoe store. You must really want the special shoe or boot, but if you do - GO FOR IT.

I have made a few pair of shoes and boots. All of these were made because I wanted footwear that would look like medieval footwear. This actually narrowed down the types of shoes I might need to make, and how I really should have made them.

Medieval shoes and boots are assembled from a relatively large nunber of pieces of leather and all of the seams are carefully designed to provide the maximum function and minimum of interference with the wearer. This means that really authentic medieval footwear cannot be made using modern machines. The most obvious example of this is the type of seam that is normally used to assemble the pieces of leather that compose the upper of the shoe. The edges of the pieces of leather are butted together and the stitches are run diagonally through the leather so that the stitches do not show from the outside of the shoe.

If you really want to learn about the construction of medieval shoes and simple boots see Francis Grew & Margrethe de Neergard's "Shoes and Pattens." (It's part of the "Medieval finds from excavations in London" series put out by the Museum of London.)