Shoemaking inspiration
I’ve taken such a long break from blogging, but seeing these yellow shoes on Instagram gave me the incentive to share! What I love about making simple shoes is that you can take key features from elegant shoes, but hand-make them in comfortable shapes and funk them up! So what would I like to copy […]
Interview with leatherworker Renee Canady
I have had the good fortune to collaborate with Renee Canady – an accomplished leather worker – on making a pair of sandals, to show what can be done with carving and tooling on footwear – that isn’t a pair of cowboy boots! She did the carving, tooling, painting and dyeing, and I assembled the […]
RHODE ISLAND SCHOOL OF DESIGN SHOE SHOW!
A few cold months ago, I had the pleasure of teaching a one-day shoemaking workshop to Rhode Island School of Design students who had just the previous day returned from a shoe-design trip to Italy. Kathleen Grevers, Senior Critic, Apparel Design, and Khipra Nichols, Associate Professor, Industrial Design, shepherded twenty design students from a variety of […]
Baby shoes made from T-shirts!
There was a recent request on a forum I’m on for prom dresses for girls who need them, and my mind went to the “T-shirt wedding dress” I had seen in a book I frequently consult, “Generation T – 108 ways to transform a T-shirt”. Making things from T-shirts is my second most-favorite thing to […]
alpargatas, espardenyers, espadrilles, and a German shoemaking manual!
What riches! Today I happened upon http://ofdreamsandseams.blogspot.co.at, where I discovered a “sole mate”! That is, a woman who is fascinated by all kinds of techniques for making shoes, and who no doubt finds solutions for shoemaking puzzlements while cogitating between 2 and 3am, as do I. I like the blogger Katya’s moccasin-making technique; I planned to […]
Multi-color boots better than ever!
I made myself a pair of brown boots with laces several years ago. Unfortunately I didn’t make the pattern quite right, so even when the laces were laced as tightly as possible, the boots still had too much room in them. I didn’t like the way the sides slumped down, so one day I decided […]
Shoe Design at Rhode Island School of Design
What a joy it was to walk around the classroom and see the sketches of shoes made by Rhode Island School of Design students who had returned the previous day from a Shoe Design tour of Italy. I had the thought, “how can there be a fresh way of looking at footwear, as so many […]
new page: TUTORIAL: How to Make the Side-Seam Moccasin-Boot
After seeing “Stephanie’s side-seam moccasin” project in Martha Stewart Living magazine, I decided to make it using different materials and stitching. I changed it further by stitching a piece of material along the top edge of the moccasin, transforming it into a boot! The boot can be found in the Craft Manual of North American […]
“Scarpits”
“Scarpits” was the name of the house shoes that my Italian “nona” (grandmother) made for all the family and required everyone to wear when visiting her home. I dedicated Crafting Handmade Shoes to her, and described our relationship in the following Introduction to this book.
Footwear Design by Aki Choklat
This is the book to purchase if you love to design footwear – or for someone you love who loves to design footwear. It’s the workbook used when the author teaches Footwear Design at FIT in New York, the London College of Fashion, and Pollimoda in Florence, Italy. But you can purchase it online – […]