Lisa Sorrell, cowboy boot maker

We have two pairs of boots ready to put on the lasts tomorrow!

Eleni has all of her boot top panels stitched and she’s done an absolutely fantastic job. I was most impressed with her ability to understand how to start, stitch an entire design, and come back to the same spot. It’s not intuitive and it’s one of the most difficult things for me to explain because I’ve been doing it for so long I’ve almost lost the ability to put it into words. I told her how to stitch the first butterfly and I had to help her through it. I assumed I’d need to supervise for the rest of the butterflies but once was all it took!

Eleni is stitching her boot tops today, and finding that a good sewing machine can be her friend!
If it appears she’s sitting in the dark with a circle of light at the machine, she is. All of my shop lights decided to burn out the week before she arrived so we’re supplementing with multiple desk lights.

Eleni, a shoe maker from Greece and England, will be in my shop for two weeks. I’m helping her make a pair of cowboy boots and she’s telling me lots of things I don’t know about patterning shoes.

One set of boot tops completed

I still have to stitch inside the flowers with turquoise thread, but I’m not going to do that until I’m through with all of the green stitching. Start in one spot and come back to that place without stopping or tying off, and don’t change thread colors back and forth. Do all of your stitching with one color then change thread colors. These are rules I live by.

Look what just arrived in the mail. A customer sent me this pair of boots (from 2005) for the Boot Scootin’ History exhibition at the Bristol Birthplace of Country Music Museum.

It took me a whole lot of skiving to get to this point, and evidently the little elves in my shop party all night instead of sweeping my floors.

New pair of boot tops started

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.