Since we’re going into fluffy slipper season again I thought I’d share this fluffy slipper tutorial I made last year, I hope you enjoy the video lesson and make lots of your own fluffy slippers from home.
What you need: (All of which you can find on our supply shop)
• Glue - https://icanmakeshoes.shop/products/shoemaking-glue-solvent-based-125ml
• Insole Board - https://icanmakeshoes.shop/products/texon-insole-board-sheets
• Soles - https://icanmakeshoes.shop/products/resin-soling-beige
You find: Fluffy Material of choice Scissors Craft Knife To read a transcript of the video, see below...
"I’m back in my studio today, and so excited about it. I'm going to share a really quick tutorial with you on something that I've been wearing to death. They are these little fluffy teddy bear slippers. They're so quick and easy to make, so let's jump into it.
So this style is pretty simple. It's just one strap across the toes. I'm going to do one slightly different for this demonstration. I pre-cut some little strips and I've just backed it with a bit of leather. And all I've done is literally just glued a piece of soft leather on the back there. I'm going to do kind of like a crossover style, so I've got four of those straps to the side. I've used some scrap, veg-tan leather that I had lying around to make some insoles. I actually accidentally cut out two left feet, but because I'm going to be covering these, it doesn't matter.
So I'm just going to flip one over and then I'll have left and right feet. I have some old I Can Make Shoes sandal soles, but you can just put a flat veg-tan leather sole or some resin soling on the base. This one, I actually just did one flat piece because I think that's quite nice for slippers. But for this one, I have little heel tips already on there, so I'll leave them on. Okay, so let's put all this to the side. First things first let's cover these insoles, so I've got a piece of shearling here, like this really cute, and I'm just going to flip it upside down.
I'm going to place my insoles on that and I'm going to trace around them with about a centimeter excess the whole way around, so it looks something like this. Once you've done that, you can go ahead and cut them out and yes, you are going to get fluff everywhere. So once you cut those pieces out, we can take our glue, I'm using the non-toxic glue and I'm going to coat the whole base of these pieces.
Right next, you can go ahead and coat the top side of your insoles, all the way to the edge. So once you've got them all glued up, you can then flip your insole so that it sits in the center like that. And then we want to put a strip of glue around the outside edge. Once you've done that and it's had a little bit of time to dry, you can start folding the excess shearling over the edge so that you're fully covering the insole and around the toe and the heel, you might need to put some little pleats in the material just to get it around the edge.
That's already looking so cute. All right, so once we've done that, we need to remove a whole lot of the excess around here. And in fact, we actually want to get the fluffy bits completely cleared from the underside of the insoles. So for that, we're going to need a little craft knife. So I've got here just a regular box cutter, and I'm just going to pull that all the way up. And I'm just going to kind of shave off the excess that I don't need, and it should start to look something like that. So look at the difference, the front is still very fluffy.
So I'm going to do the same on the other one. I want to put my straps on in sort of a crossover manner like that, so I'm going to do this directly over my foot, but first thing I'm going to do is flip the insoles over and flip the straps over. I'm just going to put some glue on the base of the insole and the ends of the straps so that when I put it over my foot, I can just stick it straight away. So I've put glue sort of all down that side and all down that side of the insoles.
And just on the very ends of the straps there, I do it like this so that whatever I end up sticking the straps there's glue there. It's kind of a non-technical way, but it’s just a fast, easy way to do it. So I'm just going to put these straps over my foot. I'm going to start by placing my foot on the insoles and just position the steps over the top. That's pretty much looking, something like that and like this from underneath. And I'll do the same with the other one. I give them one last check on your feet before we start trimming any excess off.
I'm super happy with the positioning of those. So the last thing I'm going to do before I put the soles on is just trim away some of that fluffy excess from the bottom of the straps, with the knife. Okay. If you need to fill in any extra bits of glue, go ahead and do that. The base of the slippers should be looking something like this now, and we are ready to stick on some soles.
Now I had already pre-cut the insoles to be a little bit smaller to fit my feet, but I left this sole a bit big, because I actually want to trim them down really specifically, to fit this. You might find that sometimes the soles are a little bit bigger than the insoles. So that's sitting really nicely on there, but you can see I've got a bit of excess to cut off the front. So I'm just going to place that right at the back. So I've drawn the excess on that sole and I can cut that out.
So I'm just going to copy that one to the other slipper so I can start gluing on the souls. I actually like to use the strongest glue, so what I'm going to start by doing is just coating the base of the soles right up to the edge and then coating the base of the insoles right up to the edge.
Once you've given the soles enough time to dry, you can go ahead and stick them down. I usually start at the heel and just really gently put it in place. So that's how the soles are looking from underneath, and from top they're looking so, so, so cute. Now you can see the difference in the two styles, and how you can use the exact same process to make your own different slipper designs."
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