Me: My absolute least favorite thing to do in leather inlay/overlay/stitching is teeny tiny letters.
Also me, given the smallest bit of artistic freedom: Hey! I should do something with lots of teeny tiny letters!
I have so many other things to do on these boots but I decided to just get the pulls over and done.
My Curved Needle is currently in a bad mood so I decided to try stitching soles by hand. It took me until I rounded the toe on the second shoe to really feel comfortable with it, and now my hands hurt. This is only the second time I’ve ever stitched soles by hand, so not too bad.
Today’s work
The design I’m working on now is a reproduction of a pair worn by Ernest Tubb. It’s always fun to reproduce a vintage design; I love getting into the original designer’s head and trying to guess what they did in the places I can’t see. I took a few artistic liberties on the boot tops but I’ve tried to reproduce the wingtips exactly. I can’t see what they did on the countertips so those are totally a guess.
Dale has a fishing guide he fishes with regularly and she’s become a very good friend. She wanted a leather bracelet with mountains and a river so I made her one. Dale says there’s a little trout in the stream that you can only see if you look closely and are wearing polarized sunglasses; she says she can see it too. Evidently it’s only visible if you’re into fishing. 😁
New sketch for customer approval, and they like it! Vintage and vintage-inspired designs like this one make me so happy. They are simply a joy to create; the lines and the way the design flows brings me peace. Note: This is a rough sketch. If there are any lines with bumps or wiggles, I’ll fix it soon. I like to rough sketch with pencil, go over it with ink to perfect it, and then I’ll stitch it with no thread in the needle to finalize the design.
This is one of the only photos I have of my first boot making mentor, Jay Griffith. He was a walking contradiction — mean, but also sometimes kind; profane, but he also prayed for me once when I had a headache (and it went away!); gruff and hard, but with the most delicate touch for boot top design. I am so grateful I had the opportunity to know and learn from him. He worked with Archer LaForce, who worked with Gus Blucher, so I can trace my boot making lineage directly back to Gus Blucher.
Did you think I was finished stitching leaves when the boots tops were completed? If so, you were wrong. I still had to stitch all of the leaves on the vamp and counter (foot and heel) and I even fit a two-color bug and wrinkle onto the vamp. Given how very much I despise doing toe bugs and wrinkles, I’m expecting a parade and perhaps a catered banquet now.
Five rows of stitching — three olive and two hunter green — come together in the leaves on the boot tops. An unintended benefit of doing every other row in a different color meant that it was easier to keep track of how many rows I’d done. When I do multiple rows in the same color I have to keep counting rows to make sure I finish with the same number of rows on each boot top!
I suppose one could make the case that I’m lazy, but I rarely ever create a design with isolated, stitched details. I like a design to flow and I feel that if each element flows into the next you should also be able to stitch them without stopping and starting. I was able to stitch around all of these little inlaid shapes without stopping to tie off my thread and then manually moving to another separate shape.
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Lisa Sorrell, cowboy boot maker 