Lisa Sorrell, cowboy boot maker

My husband Dale taught Paige how to replace the ballast in a light fixture today.

She says her arms are going to be sore tomorrow!

As you can see from the expression on our faces, I’m goofy about her and she’s just goofy.

Here’s a link to my December newsletter.

December 2014

If you should visit my shop right now, here’s what you would see in the front room. Two pallets of silk thread have been unloaded and sorted by thread size. Shelves have been ordered and my oldest daughter Morgan has accepted the job of sorting it by color and placing it on shelves when they arrive.

This is the next pair of boots I’m starting.

First, isn’t this a cool photo?

Second, notice how I’m cutting just inside the dotted lines? I do that on purpose because after the inlay is done I’ll need to stitch around it. The dotted line is my stitching line, NOT my cutting line. If I cut directly on the dotted line and then stitch on the edge, the entire design “grows” a little. This can be fatal for a design with multiple small elements close together or one that’s very close to the side seam.

Here’s a photo progression of the work I accomplished today.

This is the design for the pair of boots I’m making. It’s on top of the leathers I’ll use and off to the right are the pattern pieces for each bit of inlay.

I’ve marked each inlay pattern piece onto the appropriate leather, next I’ll cut them out and skive all of the edges.

Each piece has been cut and skived. I still enjoy watching a seemingly random pile of little bits of leather come together to form a beautiful boot top.

And… this is what my floor looks like after an afternoon of skiving.

I haven’t felt well today but the colors on these boots have cheered me.

There’s a little hole in this piece of leather. Instead of avoiding that area altogether I positioned the design so that I’ll be cutting out a flower shape where the hole is. I’m convinced that this is how and why cowboy boot makers discovered inlay and overlay.

Good news this morning! I sent a pallet through FedEx several weeks ago. Somewhere along the way they re-weighed it, decided it weighed 700 pounds more than it actually did, and tried to bill me for $1500 more than the original quote. I can only assume there was another pallet sitting on top of it when they re-weighed it. I’ve been fighting the charges for weeks and today I finally received a bill for the correct price.