Some of my designs

I thought it was time you see some of my shoe ideas.  I have so many and most are in drawing format but, after I fired the factory I was in a real low spot.  All of my leather, lasts, components etc.. were at the factory and were probably not coming back, at a certain point I let go of it all.   Right after that I spent some time in shock (I guess that’s what it was) then I thought “well I should probably get away from trying to think my way out of the mess and just get back to the creative me and what I love to do.”   I think sometimes we get so focused on the business of doing that you forget why it’s your dream in the first place. 

It’s interesting that I hadn’t thought of doing this before but up until August, I have always drawn my shoes, done specifications and picked my leathers as separate independent tasks.  When I went to the factory I would sit with the pattern maker and watch him make the patterns, turn it into a pullover, then I would watch as the shoe made its way through the various stages of the process.

Because my factory was in another state and my leathers were coming from Italy I usually didn’t have a last or leather to play with at my office. To be honest I don’t know why I had never taken a last and played with it,  it seems strange to me now that I had never done this.  Especially when you start seeing that your designs look different than you would expect.  Sometimes the difference is the pattern and sometimes the difference is in the material selection, such tiny details really make huge differences.  I will go into detail about that more in the future with very specific examples.

Anyway, I was feeling down and thinking about all of my beautiful leather that I couldn’t even do anything with, so I thought maybe I should play around with some materials I do have access to.  My lasts were not within my access either so the next best thing seemed to be my own shoe closet.  I went to Michaels‘ and Joann’s looking for fabric and components that caught my eye and decided to do some semi designing with what I had on hand. 

These are the pictures of some of the designs I made.  Warning; I cannot sew at all so these are all cut, pasted, taped, wired, whatever I had to do to make them stay on the vamp of existing shoes.  So when you see the vamp doesn’t necessarily match  the rest of the shoe that is why, I just picked a silhouette that I liked and worked on top of it.