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Not sewing, but a repair

 My feet are, as or dear friend Father Blute, used to say, "My cross to bear".  Unless they are perfectly shod, they get cranky and let me know what is wrong in no uncertain terms.


I have owned the boots pictured below for many years. 

I bought them , a vintage pair of Larry Mahan boots at an online auction. They are really comfortable. Unfortunately the delicate snakeskin on the foot part of the boot has begun to break.


I had repaired two other pairs of boots


a couple of years ago by covering broken leather with leather patches put in place with barge glue.


I did the same operation again last night, but instead of using the thin and flexible metallic leather that I had used for the patches above, I pulled out a heavy olive green skin that I had purchased somewhere a really long time ago.

Last time I draped newspaper over my boot tops to create a pattern. This time I was more clever and taped strips of painters tape over the boot parts that needed to be patched. I carefully peeled the blue painters tape off the boot, then taped THAT to newspaper and used that as my pattern. I think I got the idea from videos showing how to make a corset pattern.  It took longer to type all of that out tan to actually do the pattern making task.

I didn't love the olive green with the orangy brown leather.

Then I remembered the amazing shoe polish I had purchased.




This incredible product deposits color on leather. I had used it to refresh an old leather jacket. I saw that you can also use this polish to dye leather.  it took about three coats of the polish with a fair amount of buffing between layers to turn the olive green black. I used the barge glue to adhere the dyed leather to my boots.



I then darkened the snakeskin just a bit.


My shoe repair place is great at replacing heels and sols. They don't do a great job on the boot uppers. I love that I will have several more years of wear out of these comfortable boots. As soon as a new tube of glue arrives I will tackle another beloved pair of boots that I was worried that I might have to ditch.


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