Shoe Designs - The gentleman's envy

The Gentleman's envy:

The Dressing Bird

For the blight of you all, I took a break from blogging after finishing Nina's bespoke high heels. So, because I had a few sketches in my book just waiting for some ink, I thought I'd share it with all of you.

So there, one can clearly see my love for two toned heels. Another quite obvious fact is, that currently I'm just drooling on the high heel which took it's style from the traditional men's dress shoes. As most of you might know, this is a brogue. The connoisseur would call it a full brogue oxford, coming from the W-styled toe cap. This cap cut is also known as the wingtip. The definition brogue means that most (if not all) of the pieces's edges have perforation decorations.

Gentlemen's dress shoes + women's high heels = <3

A simple equation.

~ Otso

The lavender bird

At the beginning of this week I was studying at Kankaanpää, and I was in the middle of making a mockup, cutting the uppers and closing (sewing). I dreamed of lasting the uppers, but it turned out I was way too optimistic to start with.
All in all, I learned good tips about making patterns, how to do them more properly, so that the process of making the shoes becomes easier. While following my tutor's advice, the uppers basically just "sat" on the lasts. This means I'll have to do minimal efforts while lasting. Which is sweet :)
Pattern drawing is one tough nut, but I think I'm already doing some scratches to it's surface.

About the project at hand; for a few months now, my obsession has been on making various brogue styled high heels, so this was a very welcome practise. Hopefully I'll get those two pairs of boots finished soon, so I'll be busy with something new for a change.

I know, I skipped alot. Again. But it's not a tutorial :) Anyways, here's the prototype, which I wanted to do before wasting precious leather. It came out really good! With these kind of traditional cuts, like the "full brogue" envisioned here, one has to be careful with the proportions, as it's really easy to ruin the look with the wrong ones. So I was kinda lucky to get it right at the first try :) What do you think?

This is why I call it a bird: the front looks like a strange bird's beak.

Someone's crazy idea was to have a folding seam on each piece.

Here they are, all lavender suede :) Unfortunately we'll have to wait until march for them to be ready, because I couldn't  take the lasts with me.

What say you?

Next up, the visit to Pertti Palmroth's now silent factory...

Studying the essence of a high heel

For those that missed my morning announcement on facebook; I'm currently having a three day educational period in Kankaanpää, as a part of my Master Shoemaker studies.
When I first came this morning, I had no idea what was going to happen. So I made a mistake by not bringing some high heel lasts or previous patterns I had made. Even though it was all awkward for me, my instructor quickly guided me to begin a test project from a pair of vintage heel lasts.

Let's see  what happened today:

This is the last. Now, I won't modify it in any way, just design something and eventually make it.  Luckily, they had some components ready: the heels and the insoles are ready :) which makes my work alot easier.

I'm currently not a big fan of pointy heels. Maybe that'll change some day?

As another proof of their antiquity: they've been cast on a wooden block.

A wooden filling inside a brass tube. You ain't gonna see this kind of construction anywhere anymore. These babies have to be nailed.

The insoles are an almost fit. Needs some tinkering.

This is the sketch I did. A full brogue oxford cut. Well planned is half done.

Next up was making the tape copy.

And that 3D shape transformed into 2D.

And this is waiting for tomorrow's mockup.

Some shoe designing & resting

Dear readers & visitors, I'd like to thank you all for your interest so far. My blog has launched pretty nicely and got some good attention from people, and it's a pity that I've been a bit under the weather for the past few days. I'd like to post more often and let you all see how the ballerinas are done, but the flue's taken my strength.

Anyways, a few days back I had a vision of two different high heels that I just had to draw down, and I thought that today's a great day to share them with you all. These kind of designs would maybe be something I'd have in my own boutique for sell, so tell me: would you buy yourself a pair?

On the left is a white leather bootie with a tattoo inspired drawing on it and the left is a pink/grey striped canvas boot. Maybe satin?The left shoe feels that it needs some more designing, but to the right one I'm very happy with!

*

I would like to wish all my readers a very very happy mid-summer festivities and a great weekend! I'll try to get some advancement posts done on the ballerina project in a few days.

Cheerio!

Eallin

The leather soles came out great! Thank you Christian Loboutin for the idea ;)

OOps! The left stiching went baaad.  Well enough this was a test pair, and not a client work.

This is the vision I had, when I heard there was going to be a fashion exhibition in the Sámi Museum in Inari, in 2010. Back then I had just started to be very anxious and interested in high heels and the aesthetic possibilities they'd offer, so I had just a couple of months to design, draw patterns, make the uppers, last them and finally build a heel and glue the leather outer sole to them. These were also the first high heels I've done.

The uppers consist of two very exotic items; traditionally tanned reindeer leather called sisna and reindeer leg fur. Sisna is commonly used by the Sámi in clothing and accessories (bags, pouches), and sometimes for footwear too. This sisna had it's fur removed, vegetal tanning with willow bark, softening and oiling all done by me. It was part of the education program in the institute. Sisna has also a very fragile surface atleast for shoes, but a nice texture to it.
The leg furs are pretty amazing too, coz they're with a very short and smooth hair, a rare item of a summer reindeer. The leg part of the fur is traditionally used to make winter footwear called "nutukkaat". Got all my leg fur from a dear friend in lapland.

I shaped the heels from two blocks of oak which I got from slöjd detaljer. And added pieces of actual reindeer antlers to create a nice whitish effect to them. They were in the Reindeer Fashion exhibition for a few months. This was the first exhibition for me, and quite exciting!

-Otso

The blacks

Yeah, I know my size in french is 48 :D

I do make men's shoes too:
I first started to grow my hair back after a long time, so I needed a neat and cool hairstyle -> ended up in a 50's quiff -> ended up buying more of the same styled clothes -> needed winklepickers -> decided to make a pair :D. So after long hours, mostly up until late night, I was building from scratch or more precisely out of plaster a model that turned out to be the lasts for making a pair of decent winklepickers.

As a kind of a test pair, I wanted them to be practical and simple, so I could use them with varied types of clothing. By practical I mean that while being all black they're really easy to maintain, and I chose relatively softer uppers and lining to be more comfy. Black, as I've come to understand is also an easy but maybe abit boring color for shoes. By simple I mean the style is just your very basic oxford, plain and simple. The heel and outer sole are all rubber/EVA for a quick manufacturing process.

All in all I was very pleased, but through some days of wear I noticed a few things: The toe stiffeners were too soft, the outer sole rubber material was crap, and maybe I should've used something better for the uppers too.
So now the lasts and "The Blacks" are back at my work for some fine tuning. I'll post the repairs project later on. Tally ho!