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Tutorial: Making Iron Age, Viking, Irish ghillies leather shoes

viking leather shoe

Some time ago we published in your fantasy costume a post about  this kind of shoes that are called Ghillies in our previous article "Medieval moccasins and ghillies for Highlanders, irish goblins and fairies".

Some pictures below so you can make an idea, and go and visit the step by step tutorial  in Therese´s blog Earth and living.

So have a look so you can refresh yourself a little bit about them with the definition, wikipedia article and so forth and get a bit of documentation about them. But now we re-catch them in order to try to attempt to make a pair for ourselves.  I happened to find a lovely blog where they had a tutorial explaining how to do it step by step, and it has a lot of pictures so if you feel crafty enough and have a piece of leather go for it... I certainly will try it myself very soon. You can read the tutorial in this other blog. Without pattern using your own foot as template, it teaches you how to achieve a comfortable pair of ghillies for your historical garment. And as you see in the picture above they look great with wool socks! :)

 making shoes
Above: this is our starting point, your foot and a piece of leather...!

pattern viking shoe

Above: scheme pattern to make your shoes

 

Comments

#1 nice tutorial!

Irishdancer's picture

that's also a nice tutorial ;) I'll use my old dance ghillies, though, after buying new ones at the upcoming Vienna feis ;)

-> http://www.feiswear.com/product_info.php/cPath/86/products_id/315

I usually go for Fay's because they're soft and have no seam b/c that reduces friction on the toes regardless of whether you're walking or dancing. Keep in mind, though, that you should buy them about 1 size smaller than your actual size b/c leather tends to STRETCH!

It hurts initially, but after some time the leather is really soft and malleable ;)

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