I’ve had a long summer break from shoemaking – much longer than I would have preferred. In short, I blame 2020 being a crap year all around. I made the pattern design for these shoes four months ago to the day. In the construction post, I describe how they were made.

And so, without further ado, I present Arkham.

I took a trip to my abandoned gravel pit of choice for a photo shoot.

I absolutely love the way this Weinheimer boxcalf looks, and think it really makes the shoes “pop”. Now I don’t ever want to go back to non-premium leather.

Playing around with ways to photograph a shoe. “Only if you’re comfortable with it.”

A closeup of the toe and outsole stitching.

And a closer look at that face:

The seamless heel was a real challenge in this super firm leather, and if you look closely you will see some places where wrinkles extend above the feather. Not great, not terrible. I still think it turned out pretty good:

I wasn’t going to do black outsoles, but I messed up a bit while dying the sole edges and thought “what the heck”. Still turned out pretty cool, IMO.

I have only done mild and tasteful image editing with all the above images – stuff like correcting lighting and sharpness to a small degree. I haven’t edited anything to cover up any mistakes, or to make the shoes look like something that differs from reality. The image below, however, is 100% unedited. It’s only been scaled down for size, which wordpress does anyway to make it fit the column. So, it hasn’t even been cropped – let alone had any changes to any ligthing, sharpness, color, contrast, etc. It’s straight from the camera, without any filter or special settings. To me, this looks quite unbelievable, as if someone spent too long tinkering with the color balance and became color blind in the process. But no – this is just what Weinheimer leather will do in the right ligthing:

Specs:

Construction: English welted
Uppers: Weinheimer boxcalf in black
Lining: 2 oz veg tanned baby calf
Insoles: J&FJ Baker
Outsoles: J. Rendenbach
Toe/heel stiffeners: 5 oz from Tärnsjö Garveri
Welt: natural welting leather from Leather & Grindery
Shank: Plastic
Heel lifts: 5 mm, mainly
Sockliner: dunno, something I had lying around the shop