Shoe Factory Tour- Holland

On a very cold day, Linda, Debbie, Lauren, and I got on a train into Holland to see the famous Klopenmuseum in Zaanse Schaan. This museum is better known as the wood clogs museum and explained how the shoes were made. In this museum there are more than 2,200 pairs of different clogs and other footwear with wooden soles, from 43 countries! Also this clog collection is known as the most diverse collection in the world.

Although everyone knows what wooden shoes are, the practice of clog wearing has become extinct. There used to be a lot of clog makers, who all had their own models, colors, and decorations. The diversity in clogs now is used to show the cultural heritage of the people who wore them. The wooden shoes museum was opened in 1990 to make the art of wooden shoes known.

Walking through the museum you learn each step in how a clog is made. First, the wood has to be collected. The shoemaker already knows the size shoes he is going to make because that determines how he will saw the tree trunk into logs. The shape of the trunk (oval, round) will determine the type of wooden shoes the maker is able to create: high, low, large, or small. Next the shoemaker will cleave or split the log. Two chisels are used because cleaving is done on an angle. Wooden shoes made from cleaving are thinner and lighter. After that the shoemaker compares the blocks to pick, which will be made into his shoes. The shoemaker looks for both of the blocks need to be made of the same type of wood, which side of the tree the blocks came from, and what side the bark is on. All these factors determine how the shoes will shrink in later steps. The fourth step in the process is trimming the blocks of wood. The shoemaker uses a chopping axe and the adze to trim a pair of blocks. This step removes the bark from the tree and starts to make the wood look more like a shoe. The next step is cutting where the blocks are shaped into wooden shoes. The shoemaker first shapes the heel, then the beak because the heel determines how high the shoe is. At the end of this process we have two blocks in the shape of the shoe.

After that, the shoemaker must bore out or parbuckle the shoes. Boring is the hardest part of making a wooden shoe. How well the shoe fits determines how good a shoemaker is. Every shoemaker has their own model on how they fit the shoe such as: high or low, round or pointed nose, straight or curled nose. The shoemaker must continue to adjust the size, which is the next step. This is done with a different drill called the chasing drill. This drill is used to create enough space for the rest of the foot to fit comfortably in the shoe. The last step is scraping the wooden shoes, which is when they smooth out the outside surfaces of the shoe. The heel is the correct size, the fitting is good, and now they are just cleaning up the shoe. Then these shoes can be painted and decorated based on the region where they are made.

I got to see a shoemaker do all of these steps right in the museum. It was incredible how a piece of wood turned into one of these beautiful shoes. In the end of the museum they had wooden shoes you could buy. I wish I could have brought one back to show my family and explain the amount of work it took the make that shoe. I definitely benefitted and learned a lot from this tour.