Lisa Sorrell, cowboy boot maker

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.

I’d forgotten about this pair of boots until I was going through some old photos the other day and found them. There’s a disagreement among boot makers — well, actually there are several, but one is whether you should begin with the innermost row or the outermost row when stitching a top pattern. I’m Team Innermost Row because I like precisely defining the negative space inside a design. This pair of boots circumvents the rules; I stitched the outermost row here and then just stitched inside until the whole thing was full of lines of stitching.
If you’ll look closely you’ll see there’s another rule broken also. The front panels are black and the back panels are cognac.

Introducing: “I Wonder If They Ever Think Of Me”

Jay had two variations of this design. I love them both and have used them for years, always giving him credit. This time the design changed a little to be more my own, almost without me realizing it. It’s very subtle, but I can tell so I thought I’d give this variation a new title.

In memory of Jay Griffith, my first mentor

I finished a pair of boots today and they’re hanging in my shop window on the boot trees.