moccasins, the final product

After spending the first two days of our week on the Longhouse project, the weather turned ridiculously hot and humid, so we hid out indoors in the air-conditioning and dedicated ourselves to finishing up the moccasins. We had already spent several work sessions making patterns, cutting out the leather, marking out where to punch holes for sewing, sewing the tongues to the rest of the shoes, and marking them for the heels. This week they sewed up the heels, then sewed on straight strips of leather to the top for flaps. And finally, they were done and ready to wear!

This was a MUCH more involved process then I had imagined, and wound up taking up the bulk of the craft time I'd planned on for this unit. We are still going to make a scaled-down version of Aionwahta's wampum belt (as soon as the rest of the wampum we ordered comes in), and this summer we will come up with some sort of finished product from the porcupine quills (which are turning out to be much more difficult to work with than we had anticipated as well), but have decided to push off the cornhusk dolls and turtle shell rattles for the fall, when we'll be needing a couple of Native tribe crafts anyway.

This coming week the boys have "Indian Woods Wisdom" camp at a wonderful nature center to sort of put a hands-on wrap to our unit. Hopefully we can squeeze in a work day or two on our Longhouse and get that finished up, too. And then -- summer break!