Lisa Sorrell, cowboy boot maker

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.

Here’s a full photo of the Marty Stuart boots that have my signature inside. I knew I had a photo of them on my computer at home. I thought I had an image of the boots at Jay’s boot shop before we sent them, but if I do have that photo I can’t find it. This one was taken at a museum exhibit… somewhere (I don’t remember).

Yesterday I got to go into the archives of the Country Music Hall of Fame and view boots from the Marty Stuart collection. My introduction to boot making was working for Jay Griffith; Jay made Marty’s boots at the time, and I learned how to do inlay and overlay work on Marty Stuart’s boots. As I viewed that early work, I was overcome with the desire to sit down with Beginner Lisa and give her some tips and pointers, because she definitely needed them!

Jay always believed in my potential. He bragged on my work, trusted me with work I probably shouldn’t have been doing yet, and told me I was as good as Betty, a legendary top stitcher who’d worked for him at Blucher Boots. Jay also decided that I should begin signing the inside of all the boot tops I stitched. I had no idea at the time how absolutely unprecedented it was to allow a mere employee to put their signature inside the boot top of an established maker.

When I looked down into this pair of boots and saw my name, I cried a little. It was so long ago and I’ve come so far. I hope that Jay would be proud. I hope that Marty knows how much of my career I owe to the fact that I learned to do inlay and overlay on the boots he had Jay Griffith make for him.

Note: I don’t have permission to share a full photo of the boots, so there is not one.

It’s time to begin building the heels on this pair.