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 […]
Old postcard showing my early shoes
Shoes for Natalie
I love the work of Natalie Chanin (www.alabamachanin.com) and how she has shared the details of her hand-stitching process in three inspirational books. Adopting her nonchalance, I no longer concern myself if the ends of my threads are visible on the outside of my work – which is a big boon to a shoemaker since […]
“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.
Shoemaker’s Wife
At an arts (and garlic) festival this fall, a woman stopped to ask me if I’d read The Shoemaker’s Wife. No I hadn’t, but I wrote down the title. Then she elaborated, telling me that she is Italian and that she especially loved the book because in it the author used the immigration story of […]
“Shoes are boring; wear sneakers”
Converse “design it yourself” ads are all over web pages I go to: I say, “shoes somebody else makes are boring, make your own!” Why be stuck with choosing colors and maybe the location of a rivet or two? Start with my book, How to make the simplest sandals for everyone with your own two […]
Quotation from Albert Einstein
“If I had known they were going to do this, I would have become a shoemaker” Albert Einstein, after the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, 1945
A bit of my history – and why make shoes?
There are so many different reasons why people are interested in making shoes: I have recently heard from two grandmothers – one has a teen-age granddaughter with feet so wide and short that she can only wear birkenstocks, and the other has a teen-age granddaughter who wears size 15 shoes! She would like to have […]