Sandals With A Punched Design – Sandalmaking

Every spring I make my children new sandals, so this year I decided to make sandals with a punched design. Before I start making them I look for inspiration on the Internet.

I love traditional leather decorating techniques from India or Africa so that is where I often look first.

For these sandals, I decided to punch the leather inspired by Gujarati leather craftspeople. They make wonderful bags, phone covers, stationary and lampshades out of leather using just a few simple punching tools.

I only needed one shape punch tool and my revolving punch pliers to make this design. I first cut out a paper pattern and drew the design on it which I then transferred to the uppers.

Leather Dyes

I love the look of hand-dyed leather, therefore always buy natural veg tan leather. In my search for the perfect leather dye, I have tried quite a few different brands over the years.

My favourite dyes are still water-based dyes but the choice of colours is so small and I sometimes long for new ones.

So here I used alcohol-based Teinture Francaise. They have a few base colours that you can blend to make quite a lot of other colours.

Each box comes with a sheet that explains the blending ratios to get the different colours which I found helpful. The dyes worked fine, they are lightfast and shiny and I do like the green I got by blending the base colours blue and yellow.

Diamond Chisels

I also tried out a new leathercraft tool: diamond chisels. I usually punch my stitching holes with revolving punch pliers but wanted to try out something different.

So, I bought a set that came with 4 chisels. I used the 4 teeth for the straighter bits and the 2 teeth to get around the curves.

My chisels have 6mm spacing between each tooth. To me, the stitching line looks just perfect thanks to the very even diamond-shaped stitching holes.

I used scrap pieces of thick midsole leather underneath the soles when punching the holes. To make the pulling out a bit easier I applied some beeswax to the chisels.

If you are inspired to start making your own sandals, check out my Sandalmaking eBook that explains all the tools, materials and steps involved in more detail.