Help with stitching scandinavian moccasins.

[juancdab]

Dear all,

I am more of a tanner than a leatherworker, and I vegetable tan reindeer and other game hides myself using traditional methods.

Although I'm not new to sewing leather either, I would like to tackle and interesting project for which I need some help. The picture attached shows a pair of komager, which are traditional northern-Scandinavian shoes. I distinguish two different types of stitching: a running stitch keeping the tongue and toe box together, and a zig-zag stitch, which looks like a very slanted saddle-stitching, on the upper parts.

I have two questions:

1) How is this extreme slanted pattern achieved? It seems like a diamond awl wasn't used, as there aren't any apparent gaps as we often see in saddle-stitching with diamont awls. Any information about this would be highly appreciated.

2)  How is the stitching at the front of the moccasin achieved? We have a running stitch around the lower side of the seam, but a slanted stitch on the top. Because there are up to four stacked layers of leather, I assume there's a running stich on top of the tongue as well, covered under a "decorative" strip supporting the slanted stitch. However, I can't figure out how that is done, so that the thin strips supporting the slanted stitch perfectly sit on the running stitch below. Any suggestions or insights will be helpful as well.

Anyways, hope this questions were interesting to some of you, as we don't see many of these projects online on this forum.

Share and learn!

 

 

 keeping the tongue and toe box together 

[chuck123wapati]

  very interesting!!! to me it looks like the sole is stitched over and back down on the zigzag stitch, possibly so you can resole the shoe. There appeaqrs to be a stitch running over the zigzag stitch on the sides you can barely make out in places.