Vocabulary needed for the following discussion…
Vamp: the foot part of a boot or shoe
Crimp/crimping: stretching the leather vamp over a board so it becomes a three-dimensional shape
Crimp Break: mechanical device that forces leather into a curve before it’s put on the crimp boards
Spring (like boing boing, not the season): shaping a pattern so that when it’s sewn together, the seams pull it into a shape that’s not flat

Many years ago I made a pair of boots with stingray vamps (no, I don’t have a photo). I only agreed to make them because all the male Texas boot makers told me that making stingray boots was incredibly difficult and I wanted to prove I could do it. The leather underneath the tough pebbled surface is very fragile and it tears easily. Making those boots, I learned to STOP. In both crimping and lasting, I took the leather as far as it would go, stopped, let it dry, came in the next day, re-wet it, and started over. It took me a while but I successfully convinced stingray to become boot-shaped.

Now I am trying to make a one-piece front with an ostrich vamp. See that big white pattern on the crimp break? I’m attempting to take that shape and make it three-dimensional, ideally without any wrinkles. It doesn’t want to be three-dimensional, without any wrinkles. We’ve been fighting for days. I think I’ve crimped these vamps eight times now, and each time I get a little closer to where I want to be. Once I finally get there, I just hope the final shape is the size I need. It’s tough to guess at a one-piece vamp size because it doesn’t always stretch in the places you wanted it to stretch and cutting it larger than needed only gives you more leather that refuses to be the shape you need it to be.

There are many boot makers who don’t crimp. They just cut spring into their vamp shape and sew it onto the boot tops, and some of them do that extremely well. But there’s not enough spring in the world to make a one-piece front without crimping.