Can I SAVE This Store Return? A Botched Patina Job Gets a Makeover-Allen Edmonds St. John

hey everybody welcome back i just want to thank you all for your continued support here at the elegant oxford as many of you already know my wife and i are expecting our second baby and we recently found out that it's a boy who will be due in may so last time my wife was pregnant with our daughter zelda she suffered from really bad morning sickness and this time around it's been no different so for the last few months she's been really sick mornings which has thrown my schedule completely off since i spend mornings and most noons watching our daughter when my wife rests thank you for your continued patience since i know i haven't been uploading as regularly as i used to i'm just trying my best to juggle my online store my shine and patina commissions and videos with my other responsibilities if you haven't already done so make sure to follow me on instagram to see the bulk of my work where i post jobs i don't make videos for and the link to my page is down in the description i hope you all had a great thanksgiving and if i don't see you before the holidays i hope you have a merry christmas don't forget i'm starting a special holiday sale tomorrow on thursday december 10th until sunday the 13th with a 10 off the entire my entire online store at the elegant oxford.com and i'm now shipping to canada so if you live there you can get whatever you want so make sure to stop on by and take a look i think you'll find that i have everything you need so let's get started on the video i hope you enjoy it welcome to the elegant oxford we specialize and offer premium shoe shines dyes and artisan patinas for quality men's brands and help others to learn the art of shoe shining visit the elegant oxford dot com for all of your shoe care and saphir medaille d'or needs i personally want to thank steve and andy over at the bondo one on ebay for today's video as many of you already know steve and andy run the largest online store for discounted allen edmonds out there they sell thousands and i mean thousands of brand new pairs factory first returns and even some gently pre-owned pairs at heavily discounted prices if you've watched my channel before you'll know that i featured them in the past and they have never let me down people constantly snag amazing deals from their online store including shell cordovan so i'm constantly checking their page to see what i can pick up steve and andy are incredibly reasonable as well so don't forget to make them an offer if you find a pair that you really really like so i've personally been using steve and andy at de bondo 1 for years and they always deliver with extremely fast shipping and even access to new shoe trees and allen edmonds belts so i'm not kidding if you're ever in the need for an allen edmonds fix make sure to visit their online store and take a gander i've left a link to their store in the description of this video so uh happy hunting so anyway i was recently contacted by steve who told me that he had a pair of saint john double monk straps from allen edmonds as a return apparently a customer bought this pair and tried to add his own patina but when he realized he was in way over his head allen edmonds allowed him to return the pair for an exchange and since andy sells store returns this pair ended up in his hands andy asked me if i would be willing to try and remedy this botched job for fun and to see if i could make them look decent with a patina of my own now i really want to make sure that if the person who originally owned these shoes is watching i hope you don't take offense to the fact that i'm working on a pair that just didn't work out for you or that i'm making a video about them we all learn in different ways and sometimes things just don't work out so if you're the original owner i hope you don't feel bad and i hope that you ended up learning something from your experience and i hope that i can make them look better than how they look now so aside from this problematic burnishing here the shoes are brand new if you look at the day night it's just literally unworn so the previous owner must have just added a patina and then when they didn't work out he just gave up and returned them so these are practically new now there are a couple of reasons why this burnishing job wasn't done correctly and one of the reasons is that the color contrast is just too much if a shoe is tan i don't recommend you use black the contrast is just it's just too stark you need to go one or two shades darker so maybe a medium brown or you know a mahogany would have worked better but other than that i mean one of the other mistakes is that i think the owner tried to use a black polish to cover the black dye he used and that's just never a good idea you want to make sure that you use a wax that's the same color as the shoe not the same color as the burnishing you want it to be you know glassed over so it really blends in correctly so i'm going to remove it using a heat gun but be very careful when using a heat gun as opposed to a hair dryer heat guns get into the thousand degree range and they can easily and quickly burn a hole right through your shoes now i'm getting too many emails and messages that i've read where people have used acetone immediately to try to remove old polish do not do that just be really careful with acetone do not use it willy-nilly even though that's what it seems a lot of people are doing use a hair dryer or a heat gun first and melt the wax off now as i'm melting this wax it really smells uh like the owner used kiwi i just know the smell the smells of a lot of polishes so i think the owner used kiwi and some type of permanent leather leather dye okay and that's and that's what he did but what you do is you want to heat up the wax and then remove it with a cloth and it'll come off pretty easily and pretty quickly especially if the heat gun is really hot okay now that i've removed the wax it's time to remove the leather dye and that needs to be removed using acetone okay just be very careful i'm i'm really skeptical that this is going to come off because once black is on leather it's it's almost impossible to remove other colors look a lot better once they're they're used to acetone on them but black is one of those tricky tricky shades that really no matter what you do it just really sticks on there so i'm skeptical but i'm going to do my best to add acetone and go back and forth and i'll see how it looks okay now i'm immediately i've already noticed an issue no matter how much i get off the second that some moisture gets back on it just darkens immediately like it was at the beginning so that's going to be an issue and it happens when you use black dye sometimes it just gets into the leather so deeply and it cures so well that uh it's pretty much permanent so i'm gonna have to find another solution but in the meantime i'm gonna keep scrubbing okay so i've scrubbed for a couple of hours and it the shoes look much better i'll say but i'm running into the same issue as soon as any type of moisture touches the leather it darkens immediately so i think what i'm going to do is i'm going to place these in the sun now in the past i've had a lot of luck um with the san diego sun and it's just so bright that if you leave a pair of shoes outside for a couple of weeks the shoes essentially get bleached now i'm not sure if that's going to be sufficient for this black dye but what i'm going to do is use shoe bags to cover the shoes except for the toe area and i'm going to leave them outside for a couple of weeks and i'll see how it goes and hopefully this will be enough so that the shoes look a little better after this whole process because acetone is a chemical and i don't want to be using it so much on one area of a shoe so hopefully i have better luck with the sun [Music] okay it's been two whole weeks um let's see what we got okay so uh let me take a break from the narration just to do a little bit of talking here in person so i left the shoes out for about two weeks and uh we're kind of coming in on san diego winter so it's dropped down to about the high 60s low 70s but the sun isn't out like it used to be so the shoes actually didn't get as light as i wanted them um i've actually done this before during the mid-summer and in one week the shoes would lighten a lot i had a pair of walnut allen edmonds that turned basically yellow basically almost white but these didn't actually turn as light as i wanted and this black is just really on there i mean it lightened up a lot but it's still super super black so i don't know what i'm gonna do here let's take off the tape and the bag okay so as you can see they actually did lighten so they were pretty um pretty dark walnut and now they're you know they're pretty darn yellow so as you can see the sun really does make a difference and it's it's an option for you it's not the only option so i don't want you sticking your shoes out in the sun all the time i think it actually rained a little bit so maybe it got a little wet here so i'm probably going to use a little bit of acetone just to try to get the last bit off but because it's so dark i think for the patina i'm going to have to use a lot of black and then another color so it could be oxblood or brown so i'll see what i do right now so let's continue on okay i actually went back and hit this area with acetone once again and it lightened up a little bit more but it got to the point where it was excessive and this leather area was feeling really rough it just was damaging the leather so i decided to stop and work around this uh this dark area and i went ahead and used uh blue painters tape to go over the edges and that's just gonna help me to be able to dye the shoe without reservation without worry about getting it on the welt and the edge okay so um after everything that's been uh done i think i'm gonna go with i'm gonna have to conceal this area really well so i'm gonna go with a mahogany color and really dark like it's going to be a really dark sunburst color that goes from black to dark mahogany to light and then light around this area kind of like a highlighted area but all this is going to be camouflaged so let's get started on that now this first solution of leather dye i'm using is highly diluted so you'll see in a couple of seconds it's going to immediately lighten up because all the rubbing alcohol is just going to evaporate but that's what i want i want to lay down a good base and transform the shoe so that its base color is going to be just a very light orange brownish color and that's what i want before i start laying down the darker layers it's just going to give it all the proper base so the contrast isn't too strong okay now the following solution is less diluted i'm going to be using the airbrush gun just to add a darker area just to start layering slowly but surely and it goes on darker but remember leather dye only goes on dark and it once it evaporates and dries all the alcohol goes away you'll get the true color so just be really patient and go back you know go back and forth and be patient so this is actually kind of an experiment i really it's a job i've really never practiced or done before so it's really just going to take a little bit of you know it's a little bit of a risk of course but i'm going back and forth here with the darker color using the pom-pom now just so that the contact between the cotton and the dye and the leather it is so the leather dye will actually absorb sometimes the airbrush gun there's an issue with using an airbrush the leather dye doesn't always actually go inside the leather just kind of stays on top so i'm just going back and forth with even darker colors and that's kind of just you know a shading process you're going from from light to dark and i'm using black here with the brush and that's really going to start to give it that depth [Music] okay sorry i had to stop the video i actually ran into a problem with the shoe and i had to figure it out and stop everything so i actually had to strip the shoe all over again because the dye just wasn't settling into the leather and that happens sometimes you have to just go back with the acetone and make sure the leather is prepped and the dye was just kind of not it wasn't blending and shading the way i wanted it so i had to go back so here's actually what i did as you saw in the video i used black and a mixture of brown and red to make a mahogany color so i actually had to do black and then mahogany over it with the air gun and then black over again and then mahogany so i kind of had to do layers i've never actually had to do that before but since the black on the toe area really wasn't coming out i had to blend the whole shoe and kind of camouflage it all so it looked looked a lot better here's the other shoe in the pair so what i wanted to do is leave the top areas lighter and then kind of have a sunburst color of dark brown reds and blacks near the bottom here so you know it's more of a dynamic um i guess it's more of a bold choice but it's it's just what was needed to really um camouflage this toe area so i really thought about it what colors i wanted and what colors i really even had an option to use and this was kind of the only option that i really thought would look decent so i did use a brush on some areas and then some areas of course just to cut down on time i needed to use the uh the airbrush so and painters tape really helps you don't you don't want to end up painting the edges so i mean this actually can get pretty hard to remove so let me just it should all come off it should but sometimes it just doesn't [Music] okay so let's get to shining these [Music] all right without further ado here's the finished product here's the before and here we have the after i hope you like how these turned out i know they're not perfect some of the areas didn't blend in as well as i wanted and some of the color didn't pan out how i envisioned it but overall i'm extremely happy with how these turned out unfortunately this jar required that i blend a lot of the black into the rest of the shoe and then add progressively lighter shades of brown until we got the sunburst highlighted look that i actually really like i want to thank steve and andy over at de bondo one once again for teaming up with me to do this video i've left a link to their online store down in the description thank you for providing the shoes for this restoration don't forget that starting today the 10th all the way until sunday i'm having a 10 off sale over at the elegantoxford.com thanks for watching and i will see you next time [Music] thank you so much for watching i hope you enjoyed this video please like subscribe and share for more content in the future visit the elegantoxford.com if you'd like to purchase any of the shoe products you've seen me use make sure to check out my other videos as well if you'd like to learn more about the art of the shoeshine don't forget to look for me on facebook instagram and twitter at the elegant oxford remember to care for your shoes so they'll last you for years to come always put your best foot forward the small details matter most so don't forget to hashtag shine your shoes i'll see you next time

Channel: The Elegant Oxford

Views: 244,999

Keywords: allenedmonds, stjohns, saphir, patina, shoerestoration, leatherdye, doublemonks, burnish, art, tutorial

Id: ekdlgDwSxV8

Length: 16min 19sec (979 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 10 2020