Footwear

Why do you call those shoes? Aren’t they boots?

Not nec­ssar­ily. The dis­tinc­tion between boots and shoes is a tricky one. Often peo­ple see tall shoes and think of them as boots. There is cer­tainly a height above which some­thing is a boot, and another below which some­thing is a shoe, regard­less of how they fas­ten. To me, those lines are above the knee and below the ankle respectively.

Per­son­ally, I try to use the ter­mi­nol­ogy set out by Olaf Goub­itz in Step­ping Through Time. In that, boots are fully enclosed (think of a gum­boot, or a cow­boy boot)  and shoes have open­ings which are then closed by a lace or another fas­ten­ing (think sneak­ers, or Doc Martens). For exam­ple, the late 14th cen­tury high shoes I count as shoes despite their height because they have an open­ing which is closed by a lace.

Pat­terns

Can you share your patterns?

Unfor­tu­nately, no. I don’t work from stock pat­terns, I develop them indi­vid­u­ally for each pair of feet I’m mak­ing shoes for so even if I had them in an elec­tron­i­cally share­able form they wouldn’t be much use.

So where can I get patterns?

Your best bet is to learn what the gen­eral form of dif­fer­ent styles of shoe are and then pat­tern them your­self. Pat­terns made for some­one else are unlikely to fit you or the per­son you’re mak­ing shoes for and if you learn how to pat­tern your own shoes you can make any­thing with­out hav­ing to find a pat­tern some­one else has made.

Can you help me make patterns?

Stay tuned. I will be putting infor­ma­tion on pat­tern­ing up here as soon as I’ve got it ready. In the mean­time you can con­tact me and ask ques­tions and I’ll do my best to help you, pro­vided you aren’t a com­mer­cial maker (in which case you’re wel­come to ask, but we’ll be nego­ti­at­ing rates before I answer).