Going to a gun show looking for a new holster isn’t as fun as going to a gun show looking for a new gun, but it’s still better than not going to a gun show. There are always a lot of people selling holsters at gun shows so It didn’t take long to find a holster that would be perfect for attaching to my boot.
A few days later I took one of my boots and the holster to a shoe cobbler and asked him to sew it on. He said it wouldn’t work. He told me that he had tried to do the same thing for other people and they always came back and had him take it off because it was so uncomfortable. “When you put a big piece of metal into a holster attached to a boot, that part of the boot becomes flat and rubs your leg or ankle.” Of course, I asked him to do it anyway. It couldn’t be that bad.
He was right. It was that bad. I had him put the holster on the side of a pair of leather lace up boots and they were impossible to wear now. Every step hurt. Luckily, he only charged me $7 so I didn’t feel too bad about cutting the holster off. I went back to the same cobbler with a pair of cowboy boots and he said it would do the same thing. This time I believed him.
I had seen some pictures of ankle holsters on that laced into the boot laces so there had to be a way to make it work. I had never sewn anything before except a random button or two. I started with a hand sewer I got at Hobby Lobby. I didn’t know what I was doing but it didn’t take long to figure out that a hand sewer from Hobby Lobby wasn’t going to cut it so I went to Ebay looking for another way.
For $200 I go this Chinese hand crank leather sewing machine:
I promptly used this $200 machine to put holes in all my boots. Nothing seemed to work. I bought every different kind of holster I could find for my revolver and for my semiautomatic. I couldn’t even get the little ones to work. A couple of times I made it out of the house wearing one but after a little while it hurt so bad I had to put the gun back in the car. I ran out of boots and started buying them from Ebay so I had a cheap way to experiment. No matter how I attached the holster it didn’t work.
I was putting my old ankle holster on after one more failed attempt and another ruined pair of boots and I wondered how it could wrap around my leg and still stay comfortable with the pistol in it. The gun didn’t rub my leg and it stayed comfortable most of the time until it slid down on my ankle. Then I noticed it.
My Eureka moment! The holster was only attached to the band and it was attached so the band could bend around my leg and the holster could stay straight and didn’t have to bend. Now all I had to do was duplicate that on my boots.
