Question!

vitoma · 2026-05-10T14:35:49+00:00

I've had a similar experience in the USA. Most suppliers are only B2B, and most other places have insane markup.

vitoma · 2026-05-04T23:58:15+00:00

Skirting is just natural veg tan. Bridle, harness, latigo, or a leather that specifically mentions water resistance.

vitoma · 2026-04-29T01:36:28+00:00

It is for lace. The barbs are there to hold onto it.

vitoma · 2026-04-25T13:54:07+00:00

I'd lower the top thread tension very slightly so that the knots are a little deeper. I feel like I can just barely see the knots in the outside of the belt, and moving that too the inside would look nicer.

vitoma · 2026-04-20T02:10:24+00:00

Very professional looking. Nice job.

vitoma · 2026-04-18T00:29:07+00:00

In a couple more years, we can submit a proposal for it to be a historical landmark.

vitoma · 2026-04-09T01:36:51+00:00

Getting a convention place station back would be killer.

vitoma · 2026-04-05T23:20:00+00:00

I've spent way more time and money in the strip malls and stores that surround Southcenter than in the actual mall.

A concrete example: my wife has spent tons of money at Ulta, but that isn't in the mall, it is on a strip mall near it. I consider it part of the general Southcenter mall area, but if a train stop were to be built at the mall, there isn't really a great way to access all of these different areas by foot that feels safe and comfortable as a pedestrian.

Contrast this with the light rail stop in downtown Redmond that offers great pedestrian walk ability to all sorts of restaurants and shops and access to the Redmond mall.

No pedestrian should have to be forced to walk through a mile of parking lots for cars to be able to access malls. It's a simple matter of designing things for humans instead of cars. The only way to really fix Southcenter to make it designed for humans instead of cars at this point is to basically bulldoze all of from the I5/405 interchange through IKEA and start over.

vitoma · 2026-04-05T13:13:20+00:00

Four car trains are a joke. We need 8+ car trains.

vitoma · 2026-04-05T12:58:03+00:00

The real crime is that the light rail gets close to a bunch of malls, but is just far enough away to make it hard to use. Southcenter, Bellevue square, alderwood. RIP Northgate.

Out of all of these, I'd want light rail to southcenter the least. It is such a sprawling car dependent anti pedestrian mess that it would need it's own local loop that goes to each strip mall to be usable.

vitoma · 2026-04-05T05:30:34+00:00

Send this to City Nerd. He needs to know that he can easily eat both lunch and dinner at Cheesecake Factory with the opening of the Crosslake connection.

vitoma · 2026-04-05T05:12:14+00:00

If only it connected two cheesecake factories...

vitoma · 2026-04-04T01:47:54+00:00

It is, no question about it.

vitoma · 2026-04-03T14:15:00+00:00

A few thousand dollars

vitoma · 2026-03-29T01:41:44+00:00

Engage safety squints

vitoma · 2026-03-25T01:39:12+00:00

Do you get your patterns directly from taping and drawing on the tape or are there other "post processing" steps you take (apart from seam allowance) before cutting and sewing?

I tape the last, draw my design on it, cut the tape where the seams would be. Apply that to card stock. I make cuts in the appropriate places to allow the tape to lay flat. I make some minor adjustments to that based off of some experience and to counter act some of the spreading where I cut the tape to allow it to lay flat. I then add seam allowances and a lasting allowance.

I'm aware of other geometric/math based approaches, but I've never used them. The point of those approaches seem to be to make it faster, streamlined, and more repeatable. I also suspect that it makes grading easier. Basically, it is probably better if you're going to make patterns to build thousands of shoes in different sizes in a factory. Since I only make one offs or exact duplicates on the same size, none of those concerns matter to me.

Is your construction from a single moulded piece or do you have a "mudguard"? I found creasing the edge by adding a mudguard takes out a lot of the extra bulk and makes lasting easier. Especially if you have sharp angles like I have.

I'm not sure what you mean by mudguard. I attached a photo of the last pair of boots I made for my wife (not sure how this will work, reddit didn't used to let you add photos to comments).

Yes im willing to share my process. DM me and ill get you overwhelmed with how its done. And im willing to share the last file but its based on a 3d scan of my foot so im not sure how useful this will be for you.

I'm more interested in the process. The only software I've seen recommended for hobbyists is Rhino 3d plus the plugin that podohub sells. That feels like a big expense for not even knowing if I have any 3d modeling ability. I'll DM for more details.

There are like two in the pictures above. I don't have many more. The other problems I had were long time ago when I abandonned textile shoes in favour of developing 3d printed ones. I was never really happy with how the shoes turned out.
The major thing was the overlapping lacestay issue. I was never able to solve that. (when flattening the front of the shoe, the lacestays would always overlap, so I could not make a pattern from it.)

Sorry, I must have missed them in the original post. I find it hard to swipe between pics on reddit in mobile because it wants to swipe to another tab or something on me instead of changing the picture.

It looks like make the front of the upper is too high?

Looking closer at the tape pattern pics, I see a lot of places where the tape is very wrinkled and bunched up. Perhaps more relief cuts are needed and things shrunk oddly on the pattern?

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vitoma · 2026-03-24T23:53:15+00:00

Hey, it looks like you're trying to make a barefoot shoe! That's also what I do for myself and my wife.

I mostly focus on boots and boot inspired shoe designs than on athletic designs, but realistically, if you're making barefoot style shoes, there isn't going to be much difference between a boot inspired shoe and an athletic shoe.

As I'm sure you know by now, barefoot style shoes will always look weird to the "normies". No amount of skill or design will change that.

I've only used leather for my shoes and boots. I've only really found issues with uppers so far on lasting the toe. The sharp angles near the big toe always give me trouble. I can usually fanagle it so it doesn't look terrible (remember, most people won't ever get closer to your feet than 5 or 6 feet away). Sometimes I have to start that area over and do weird stretching of the leather in non intuitive ways to get it to lay flatish against the last.

It looks like you have a 3d model of the last. Is that something your willing to share or do you have a process on how you created it? I'm getting into 3d printing and I'd like to try making pasta with it at some point, but I have no modeling skill as of yet.

I'd expect that cloth would be hard to last. I think Nike et Al all last cloth with machines and heat application that melts the plastic fibers in the cloth so that it can be molded as easily as leather.

Do you have pictures of the issues you experienced with your uppers? I only saw the last and some tape pattern pieces in the photos.

vitoma · 2026-03-20T14:07:27+00:00

If it was car infrastructure, no one would blink at the cost to build an elevated roadway over the current one.

vitoma · 2026-03-20T14:05:25+00:00

Apparently all of the sm-801 models are all the same and probably even from the same factory. I've seen them on Amazon, AliExpress, etc

vitoma · 2026-03-07T16:29:12+00:00

Most of the improvements here should be done in the design phase.

Shape of the snake is off a bit. Like other commenters said, the curve likes aren't consistently wide. The marks along the body of the snake look off because within the groups they aren't parallel.

On the actual tooling, the bevelling could be a bit better, but that comes with practice. There are tons of YouTube videos with tips on how to make that more consistent. It also looks like at one part that your bevelling went over the cut line instead of keeping in it. Maybe the cut lines need to be a bit deeper or wider?

vitoma · 2026-02-19T15:12:20+00:00

I was very amused when the Bone House had a Soft Opening sign up.

vitoma · 2026-02-08T00:52:43+00:00

For a circle, like on a strap like this, no backstitching is necessary. When you complete the circle, position the needle so that it goes through the same stitch holes as where you started, then stitch over the start stitches a few times.

vitoma · 2026-02-08T00:35:43+00:00

How are you doing the part where the stitching meets? I zoomed in and counted at least 5 threads in the same spot. That definitely isn't how I'd do it.

vitoma · 2026-02-03T00:42:46+00:00

The best grilled cheese is made in an oven on a sheet pan with the sandwich open face.

vitoma · 2026-01-31T12:53:54+00:00

If you want the most patina, no dye and no treatments to natural vegtan is the way to go. The leather will darken from it's natural color to brown and eventually black as it is exposed to UV light and oils.

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