Good morning lovely people.
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| Our hiking path. |
This week approaching looks to be a bit more steady, like with hiking, I'm hoping to get back into the habit of blogging regularly again.
Because I haven't had much extra cash as of late to do fun things, I've decided to look back through why I have and see what can be fixed/repaired, or what is in the waits because I have not figured out how to use it.
I bring you my candy shoes.
I'm sure you remember these.
Well crap! I thought long and hard how I was going to repair these shoes. How could I fill the heel? What could I fill it with? Hot glue? Wood? What do I cap the heel with?
After some thought, I decided to try a piece of leather I had from a freelance project. It worked great, but I still had not deduced about what to fill the heel with.
Then I remembered this glue I had. It's water activated and it expands fusing into whatever its touching. I thought this would at least be a try for what I'm thinking, so I filled the heels (about 1/4) with the glue, then slapped a square of leather on the bottom and allowed them to dry.
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| Hollow heel with glue inside. |
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| Old heel caps. |
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| Using the weight of the chair legs as a clamp. |
It worked great!
I tested these shoes out by walking about 2 miles and they held up great. Now these shoes can be in my regular rotation again! Yay!
It's amazing how doing small fixes can take forever, but also how often we just ignore or forget. I have some more projects in this vein, so stay tuned to see those soon.
Okay lovely people, I'll see you soon!
That is clever! I had a couple of pairs of cheap shoes with heels like those and I just ended up throwing them away - hating myself for being wasteful!
ReplyDeleteClever repair -- 'Invention is the mother of necessity'. There are so few shoe repair shops anymore--wish I had someone like you in my area. Like Foodycat, I end up throwing bad heeled shoes away.
ReplyDeleteHi, I've been enjoying your blog for ages, but couldn't get my comment thing to work.
ReplyDeleteIt seems to me a small tub of wood putty would fill in those heels and strengthen them for a serious repair job. You would have to layer it so it drys completely.
I adore your comic, and look for it every week! ^_^
Thanks :)
ReplyDeleteI try not to be a wasteful person, especially since i put so much work into these shoes. The heel incident was very disheartening, and its not as if the heels needed any support, they just needed to be filled so the padding on the bottom would not sink in or shift.
Ah, make and mend has so many facets. As if you needed a time sink of repair fun, Instructables is my go-to website for fixing and grand ideas of new stuff to make/old stuff to remake. Keep thinking that I should set up a site where folks can post their remake/remodeling; this post would be a great example of using one genre's tools to fix another genre's items. Most excellent work!
ReplyDeleteThat one is clever and I am amazed that some shoes can be repaired like this. I will try this technique on one of my pairs.. Thank you for sharing this blog
ReplyDeleteWhy not just glue the old heel plates back on?
ReplyDeleteYou could also screw them in place, pre drill the holes on the plates/caps, pre-drill the channels/posts that are already molded in, use wood screws with a helping of glue. Then glue the leather or some rubber on top of that.
The old heels were cracked and quite cheap. I ended up using the wood spackle suggestion and the felt worked great for the duration of the shoe.
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