20250812 - Repairing Shoes

[first pic of shoe] (oh this one is going straight into the archive. it just happened too fast to go on the "currently working" page) This is my favourite pair of shoes. I bought them around three years ago, I had a cobbler fix their soles a year ago, and I picked them up for $25 and have worn them ever since. They're comfortable (well, comfortable enough after eight hours of walking), I think they're stylish, they go with plenty of my outfits. Sadly... [pic of zipper] I'm not sure how it happened, I don't know why, but sadly they are no longer wearable. Luckily! I am a competent seamster, and replacing a zip is well within my capabilities. However as I sat there unpicking the zip to measure its length, I realised that, while I could certainly replace this zipper, the next one was bound to fail. And then the next one after that. And so on and so on until zippers were a thing of the past. I needed something more robust and easily replacable, I needed something I could make myself in a pinch, and I needed something that still fastened my shoe up over the ankle. I needed... buttons. But before I could find buttons I needed to have something that I could attach buttons to. I found a strong piece of linen in a pile of fabric at the bottom of my wardrobe that didn't stretch and seemed tough, and I went about fastening it to the shoe. Here he is by the way all unlaced and unpicked. I love taking apart and modifying garments like this because there's a real sense of discovery in finding out the secret ways that these things are put together. I don't have a photo of it but found this line of soft foam running at a slanted line around the back of the shoe, which obviously is to soften how tight the leather can be when the shoe is laced up (and is likely slanted from people putting their feet into it for so long (these were second hand by the way) and I never noticed it until I came across it as I took the shoe apart. Stuff is so well and so carefully designed I feel the same way I did when I was disassembling CD players as a little kid, just amazed by how much thought went into something so innocuous. Anyways. I attached the linen and the buttons. Whilst I decided to go with matching buttons, the linen itself is pretty different to the original shoe, but this is a choice I made! I really like repairing stuff, and because I think the act of repair is such a rare thing, I like making that repair KNOWN and VISIBLE. Asymmetrical things are interesting and make you look closer at them. Anyways here's what it looked like all put together. [pic of shoe with buttons n linen]