My daughter and I just finished making a pair of Ojibwa style shoes for her. We got the plans from "The Snowshoe Book", Osgood and Hurley. I cut down a couple straight white ash trees and split out wood for the frames with an ax, then shaped them with a block plane. I made a couple jigs, but they didn't really work well. It's just as easy to assemble the sides and cross pieces on a flat floor, hold them together with C-clamps, and weight them down with boards. The toe can be bent up in a second process. To make the sides easy to bend, we wrapped them in rags and poured boiling water over them for a couple hours. We used copper roofing nails to rivet the toes and tails together, with copper washers fashioned from some leftover roofing. The decks are woven from a total of 200' of nylon webbing. She hasn't used them yet, she's going to dip them in a pan of urethane varnish first. It was fun, but a lot of work.
White ash trees being split into frame stock:
Weaving the deck:
Ready for the varnish:
