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One More for Lord Of The Rings

Not as interesting as the strider boot, but we just finished a pair of boots for a Gandolf costume.

The new challenge is a pair of Turkish style slippers for the Yale Drama Department’s current production. To achieve that soft little upturned toe we are using deer skin. It stretches so we can shorten the top [...]

Finished Strider boots

It took me a whole day to get up the courage to mess them up. The experiments on the left overs looked ok but not great. I mixed up the gunk and started caking it on, then had to wait over night to see what I had. When I knock off the clumps and rubbed [...]

Strider boots are ready for mud

All the parts have finally arrived for the Aragorn character from The Lord Of The Rings and are assembled. The shoe laces were made from braided 1/8″ cotton rope found at Home Depot (boy, did they look at me funny when I told them what I needed) and the rope wraps are drapery and upholstery [...]

Next Step for Aragorn’s Boots

I picked up the completed strider boots yesterday and am quite pleased with the results. The solution to the cuff doesn’t look out of character with the original. I’m borrowing a pair of barn boots from a friend whose daughter rides to get the wear patterns to look authentic. The last unexpected problem is the [...]

Finishing the Strider Boots

The Strider boots from the Lord Of The Rings movie are in the final stage. Teasing out the details on the action figures we are using for reference didn’t give us a lot of information about the construction of the cuff. Neither did several re-runs of the movie. We arrived at what we feel is [...]

The Ivy League came calling

I had an interesting call from a nice young man in the Yale University theater department. He needed a source for period shoes for a production that they’ll be doing this spring. I explained that we are totally custom and that he’d need to provide me with actual foot outlines and measurements for us to [...]

Success with the Strider boots

The prototype has returned from it’s fitting and is going into production. The only detail remaining will be just how to “distress” them. I re-watched the Lord of the Rings movie and went by one of the riding stables and took a look at wear patterns on boots that spend a lot of time on [...]

Polishing Renaissance Slippers, LOR Mockup

While I was cleaning up my shoes after the Escondido RennFaire, I thought I’d pass along a tip for working around those cutouts. I cut a piece of blue painters tape the shape of the slash and cover the underlay with it. I work around the holes with a Qtip and then buff. The tape [...]

Lord Of The Rings challenge

We just got an order to create the strider boots from the movie. It should be interesting. The best “image” of those boots is the action figures which may work out pretty well. It does give us a 3-D view to work from. Even found a chunk of accidentally distressed leather. It fell off the [...]