Elevated Footwear - Chopines

   
A couple of years ago I had the pleasure of meeting Queen Cassandra of Caid when she and King Sven attended Canterbury Faire in our fair Barony. I decided to make her a pair of chopines for her to wear with her lovely venetian outfits and set about researching how to make and decorate them.
I spent a fair bit of time over this and during my search found a great site run by Francis Classe at
http://aands.org/raisedheels/ . I found his work really informative and Francis himself very helpful.

Following my research and some helpful hints from Francis I produced my first pair of chopines.
I began by roughing out laminated pine boards with a band saw and attached a marine ply base to act as the sole.
The next step was to complete the shaping of the body of the chopines with rasps, gouges and a belt sander to prepare them for upholstering.
Once the shaping was done i cut and tooled a leather sole and vamps.
I added a little Caidan Cross in honor of Her Majesty.

I managed to get hold of some nice light blue velvet and silver trim and upholstered the chopines using a four piece pattern I'd seen on the raised heels site. The finished product ended up thusly, which I thought was a nice amalgam of the two extant examples below. All in all I was reasonably happy with my first effort.