Our Tutorials

Our Tutorials for Moccasin-Making or Barefoot Shoemaking

Just like making your own clothes, making your own shoes is definitely possible.
Not only it is possible, but we wish to let you discover that it is quite easy and very affordable compared to traditional leather craft.

No experience needed in sewing or leather-work.

All our tutorials are made for beginners but will surely be of interest to experienced seamstresses and leather workers.

Make our own shoes in less than a day

Within a day or less, you could already be wearing your first pair of homemade/handmade barefoot moccasins. With a little practice, all eager crafters succeed in making professional-looking shoes for themselves and their beloved in only two or three hours.

No sewing machine, only simple tools

What I love the most about the way we make moccasins is that it only requires a few manual tools. You know, I love sewing, but I hate struggling with sewing machines. With my pair of scissors, my awl and my needle, I never get upset or frustrated, they always work. I can take them wherever I go, I can work silently on my knees or even standing behind my market table, and they cost almost nothing.

In the opposite, with traditional leather working, making the simplest leather project would already require a dozen of specific tools. Not only they are costly but they are not always easy to master. Same thing with sewing machines… Here you won’t have to invest much money and practice time to start mastering scissors, marker, awl, and needle. In fact, you probably have most of these tools at home and know how to use them.

Video Tutorials

From trying to learn craft from books myself, I know how mind-boggling written tutorials can be. It’s a fact: a craft is a living skill. It is much easier to learn from watching someone doing it in front of you than from reading a text with images. It is the gestures and the little (invisible) tips that make the teaching complete. That’s why we have recorded video tutorials.

In every one of our tutorials, I demonstrate and explain in detail every step of the process of making moccasins, just as if you were watching over my shoulder.

From teaching many workshops in person and from years of experience making and selling custom-made shoes on local markets, I know exactly beginner’s mistakes and other common issues you could face to address these topics and guide you as precisely as possible.

My goal in recording these tutorials was to make it as easy as possible to get you started in the art of moccasin-making. Making shoes is not a mystery or something only industrials and advanced shoe-makers can do, our ancestors have been doing it for thousands of years and it shall go on.

Learn at Your Own Pace

The tutorials are split into small videos between 5 and 20 minutes on average. You can watch and replay them as many times as you need and at your own pace. In total, the tutorials are on average around one and a half hour of teaching.

Those videos are hosted on Vimeo. You will receive a password to access them; no registered account is required.

With Written Explanation too

To complete the video tutorial, a PDF tutorial is included with large images and written explanations. It is complementary to the videos to help you remember all the important steps and tips without having to watch all the videos again. It also helps to picture some details that could be hard to see in the video.

If English is not your mother tongue, you can use this document to translate it into your own language with an automatic translator like DeepL. It might be very helpful for you…

With Printable Patterns

To make it much easier for you to get started, you will receive with the tutorial, a full set of patterns that you can print with any home printer on US letter or A4 paper.

If you don’t own a printer, you can get them printed for you in a service shop, a library, a book store, or a post office for instance.

Will the patterns match our foot size and shape ?The adult patterns are usually suitable for feet from size 34 to 48 EU+ / ….

Our patterns are not delivered in standard sizes like you would find in shops but in a range of sizes of different widths. After measuring your feet, you can choose the pattern that is closest to your foot size and the length will be adjusted directly on your feet after stitching the front part of the shoes. Therefore, the same set of patterns will enable you to precisely fit any kind of morphology type with very little effort (or not at all) to customize the pattern.

From experience, our patterns fit about 80% of the people without making any scale adjustments. Some designs can fit some foot shapes better than others, see this page for more details.

If your feet are a bit “out of the standard”, you can contact me to get advice on the best design to suit your foot-shape or size.

I also offer to make custom-made patterns to relieve you from the task of adjusting your pattern when you are at beginner’s level, just trying to make your first pair…

Note: If you are a bit experienced with craft or sewing, adjusting the patterns is not that difficult. Some tutorials go into the details of this topic.

“The Base” Tutorial, an Extensive Course about Pattern Making

All our tutorials come with printable patterns except “The Base” and the “Minimalist sandals on which you will learn how to draw your own patterns. For these tutorials, suggestive patterns are delivered but not in all sizes.

“The Base” is particularly interesting for people who might want to make their own patterns and shoe designs. In this extensive course, I demonstrate how to make about ten different styles of low moccasins and boots from the same basic pattern of a side-seam moccasin. It is the opportunity for me to share almost all my know-how on the topic of moccasin-making. To make it really complete, I have included details about children's moccasins and lined moccasins for winter.
Although this tutorial is more advanced, it is made accessible for beginners.

How it works

Straight after your purchase, you will receive access to the full tutorial in videos to watch online as well as a PDF booklet and a PDF printable file with all the patterns (to print in A4 or US letter). Soon after, we will send you everything by email as well.