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.