This is @lewaswrite from #nigeria

INTRODUCTION

It’s my pleasure to acknowledge every admin and moderator of "@steemforladies". Sweet ladies, I hope you all are doing great. I love to participate in any creative contest on Steemforladies which give me the opportunity to showcase a beautiful talent I have which is shoe cobbling (using knitting method). I came today to join in the competition organized by @ngoenyi "Let's do it...Do It Yourself👉Craft, Creativity, Drawing, origami, DIY, Recycling, and more||Week #59."

Let’s look briefly into shoe making using a knitting method theoretically.

What is knitting

Knitting is a method of creating fabric by interlocking loops of yarn with knitting needles. Shoemakers commonly use a type of thread called waxed thread or cord for stitching shoes.

The waxed coating helps prevent fraying and adds grip to be sure the stitches stay tight and secure, which is important for footwear to endure constant wear. Waxed thread is used in different shoemaking methods, such as sewing soles to the upper part of the shoe, stitching decorative details and firm seams.

Materials and uses

• Scissors: for cutting of your materials
• Sandal sole: for the cobbling of the sandal
• Shoemaker thread: for knitting
• Knitting pin: for interlocking the thread to form a design
• Gum:for coupling of the sandal sole, pad and the knitted designs together to give it a firm hold
• Hook or button: it can be any design or shape that you can use to buckle the shoe
• Shoe mould: used for sizing your shoe during your knitting process because the knitting of a lady using size 38 will be different from a lady using size 42.
• Shoe pad: used with the sole of the shoe to avoid having a painful feeling under your leg due to the hardness of the sole.

PROCEDURES

Get your materials out and create a picture of what you want to produce either by inspiration or from the internet. But today I’ll be making a simple sandals even though the process takes days and sometimes weeks depending on availability of materials to be used.

STEP 1

Get your materials, namely knitting pin and thread, you start by interlocking it to get a design.

STEP 2

Repeat the designs until you successfully make the different shapes of what you want.

STEP 3

Bring out your sandal sole and try to test the ones you’ve made.
You can use a shoe mould to try to measure the work but in a case where you don’t have a mould, you can use your leg or someone around you that wears the size of shoe or sandals you want to make.

STEP 4

Couple the sandal together using a gum and shoe pad.
Personally I do this process with a professional shoe cobbler to get a very neat and lasting result.

conclusion
I have to show manually how the coupling looks like because taking it to shoe maker may take up to a week or more to get the shoe done in my area. I hope we’ve learnt something and guess what I can assure you that shoe cobbling is a very rare skill for a lady but it’s a very lucrative business to do in your spare time.

Thank you @ngoenyi for organizing this beautiful competition and allowing us to showcase our skills. Thanks to all Steemians. I am very happy to participate in your contest. Hope everyone will likes my work.

I would like to invite @hyacinthfavour, @jovita30 @alexanderpeace to participate in this competition.

Thanks for your support