Full Restoration on Allen Edmonds Carlyle: Patina, shine and Re-lasting

Hello my friends and welcome to MB Shoe Doc where we take the ordinary and make it extraordinary. We will be covering the art of patina and shine and learn to breathe new life into old shoes. So grab your dyes and polishes and get ready to get your hands dirty and let's dive right into today's project. All right I've got a fun project here today. So this is an Allen Edmonds Carlisle. Now typically I consider this to be a very beautiful kind of a very sleek shoe for Allen Edmonds. Sleeker than most of their shoes. But this one is a hot mess. I don't know what happened to these. I got these off of eBay. I think someone tried to do a patina on them and it just looks it just looks dirty. It just looks like a mess to me. I call this a failed patina attempt. So we are going to look at stripping these guys down starting all over and see if we can't make something beautiful out of them. All right we've got the shoelaces out. Kept the shoe trees back in. I think you know what time it is. When you see the sexy gloves come out it is stripping time. A little bit of acetone. We're going to try to remove whatever was done to these poor shoes. Hopefully this will strip pretty easily. I don't know what they put on here. I'm not sure if the patina. Yeah it comes off pretty easily. I don't know if this patina was dye work. I don't know if they just tried to do it with cream polish. But whatever it is we're going to get it out of here. Stripped. You can see that at one point this thing was a walnut shoe. Turned into whatever the heck this thing is. So we will get the other one stripped to match it. A whole lot of stripping going on over here in my house today. So we'll get them to match and then we will look at recoloring these things. Try to make them beautiful again. Typically I will do the dye work next and then I condition at the end of everything. But these are particularly dry and so I'm using this pure polish. This is conditioner cleaner and so this will actually remove a little bit of that that old finish and it's going to rehydrate the leather. It's going to help a lot with the creases. So I really want to do this. Kind of rehydrate this leather first. Let it sit for a day before I go and try to add dye to them. The leather was just in in pretty rough shape I felt. I'm going to do something a little different. I've not tried this before. So this is the regular kind of Nordstrom typical shoe tree. That is what's in this shoe here. There's still quite a bit of creasing on the vamp here and I just don't know that that's going to get pulled out with this shoe tree. Then I've got a lasted shoe tree. This is from a pair of Vash shoes and I think this is going to work a lot better. So I've put the Vash shoe tree in this shoe and I like the way that it pulls the leather. It adds a little bit more of a shape to it and as I kind of push it and flatten it out onto this lasted shoe tree I really like the way this looks. If you can see the difference here it's you know a little subtle but this one is just a little bit more rounded. This one kind of flattens it out adds just a little bit more of a dynamic curve to this outside edge compared to this. So I am going to look to kind of steam shrink these shoes onto this last. So here you go you can see again when I put it on this last shoe tree this is stretching out these little creases much better than the generic shoe tree. So I'm going to look and see if I can't actually reshape these and kind of last them onto this Vash shoe tree. I think this is going to be pretty cool. So first thing I'm going to do I'm going to soak the leather shoes here. I've got just a really wet rag so I'm just going to soak these. I could soak them you know in a tub something like that too but I'm going to try to do it this way just really get these things well saturated. So I'm literally taking a flat iron here and I'm actually going to steam these areas. So just a damp cloth putting a decent amount of pressure on this really trying to get the leather to shrink onto that lasted tree. So I think this is working exceptionally well very happy with the way this is looking. So at this point I'm going to let this just sit and air dry naturally. I'm not going to apply any more heat. That has really stretched out all these creases kind of ironed them out basically and this is fitting much tighter to this shoe tree. So really thrilled with the way this is working out. Ignore the color differences I rehydrated these and you know kind of darkened the tone just a little bit so ignoring the color differences but just the the shape difference in these now I mean this has a completely different shape than it did before this one here. The creases are much much better very well flattened So again this has got just the generic you know kind of your typical wood lower shoe tree not bad nothing wrong with it it's fine but compared to the lasted tree. Now when I take this one put this lasted tree in again same shoe but there is a whole lot of space here compared to this one look at this when I push on it it's almost no space at all so when I steamed this I mean it really shrunk the leather really tightened it onto that in fact hopefully I can get the shoe tree out of here but you really tightened it down onto the shoe tree look at the difference how much space there is on this one compared to this this one is tight on the tree so I'm looking at doing the same thing here that's going to take out this little extra space in there it's going to tighten up all the creases on this one tighten up these creases on the side and yeah we'll get them both to match but really thrilled the way it worked out on this one we'll get this one to look the same both shoes are now relasted onto these shoe trees you know this worked out really fantastic that can't believe how well it worked out honestly one word of caution though doing this on these shoes is fine because I already am stripping the finish and I'm looking to patina them anyway however if you just were doing this on a regular pair of shoes at home that you were keeping there is a high chance that that steaming process would remove the finish of the shoes so you know wouldn't do it on a pair unless it was a patina project type of pair these are ready at this point to begin to add some dye so we're going to get to the coloration get to the fun part here next we're going to see how this walnut color looks for adding a little bit of a burnish to them and I purposefully went very light with the dye so I literally just shake up the bottle a little and I'm just dipping in what has gotten into the cap and even after that I'm still wiping the brush off a little bit too so I'm going to go along the base along the entire shoe I want to darken it up there add some shading and the last thing I'll also do is go along the top of this shoe a little bit behind this stitch line as well so here you can see the difference this one's got the burnishing added this one has not and you can see I just went along the top the heel the base and kind of behind this stitch line there just going to get the other one to match and I think we're going to be done here at this point I'm finished with the dye work I'm satisfied with how it's looking and just going to rehydrate the leather and also wipe off any unabsorbed surface dye I like to use BIC 4 for this it's a good conditioning lotion and the benefit of it really is that it doesn't remove dye quite as strongly as some other conditioning lotions some of them tend to strip the patina a little bit more than what I want good I was hoping these wouldn't darken up too much I wanted to leave this kind of lighter caramel color to them I'm really happy with how this is looking except these have sat for a minute just going to brush them off a little bit here conditioning lotion absorbed in well we should be left with just a kind of a soft shine on them I think that's looking pretty nice nice soft shine one other thing I'll show you is just how well the shoe keeps the shape and how well it is fitted to this shoe tree so here's that lasted shoe tree and especially on kind of this edge here very different shape than what the shoe had originally I really like it and yeah these shoe trees fit just absolutely perfect with hardly any space in there it's just just a perfect fit so get them both brushed off and they'll start to this is Saphir cream polish dark brown it's going to add just a touch of shine on the toe to also kind of darkening it up touch more kind of sealing in that burnish I'll do the same on the heel so maybe darkens it up just a touch further not too much I just did that cream polish on both shoes give them another quick brushing here time to add a little more shine so I'm going to use this Saphir wax here this is in dark brown I'm just going to get a little bit on my fingertips here and apply by hand so I like to get a nice base layer with the darker wax like this kind of build that up so this helps to seal the patina it adds shine and because I'm using the dark brown wax it'll kind of preserve the dark coloration sometimes if you go at it with the neutral wax it can strip a little bit of the patina and kind of lighten things up I just want to keep it darker here so I'll do the first few layers kind of like this by hand with the dark brown wax and then I'll probably switch over to neutral because I don't want it to darken too much so I did a number of layers by hand let it sit for maybe 5-10 minutes or so let it kind of dry take a fresh cloth this is just a t-shirt and I've got a little water dispenser here I'm just going to tap it here just getting this damp not too wet and I'm taking some of this Carmina wax in neutral I'm just getting a very little bit on the fingertips here take a single little drop on the toe and I'm going to buff at this point primarily what I'm doing is just smoothing out those layers that were already applied by hand so it's a tiny little bit of water and the neutral wax really kind of smooth things over quite well so here we are complete laced up shined up ready to go so once again if you recall the way these started completely unwearable failed patina and quite a mess stripped them cleaned them up reshaped the leather onto lasted shoe trees unwearable to absolutely proud to wear hope you enjoyed this video as much as I did I'll have these on the feet real soon see you on the next one