A lastmaker
Using these pieces of wood, I’m planning to create a truly special pair of women’s wholecut pumps.
This part of the job is something I truly enjoy doing. Every time I pick up a piece of raw wood, my imagination begins to “speak in secret alphabets, the fingers weave quick minarets…” If you know what I mean.
In this particular case I only start working on the pair once I have a shoe design in mind. It has to be clear enough to properly align the shapes to upper details. With sandpaper in hand, applying the finishing touches, working on angles and edges, I feel immense excitement about what the next step will be.
I obsessively dream and think about the project. From there, it's just a matter of time and effort. The vision finally comes to fruition.
That's why it's so important to be a one-man operation. Under no other circumstances is it possible to achieve this level of integrity and continuity in the production process.
I made this particular pair of lasts for my upcoming women's wholecut project, which will be released in July. The design is original and unique – as usual with me – but this time it also stands out for its new type of construction. Honestly, I haven't seen a solution like this anywhere else. At this point, it only exists in my head. I'm not even 100% sure it will work. But that's just how I am. It's an experiment, and you already know how I feel about such things, right?
So what do I do to achieve this? I've already written about how I managed to make a pair of shoe lasts and shoe trees from a piece of raw wood. That's because I was curious and ambitious. To gone through the entire process having so little knowledge and experience was crazy.
It's certainly possible to produce a pair of lasts out of block of raw wood starting your every shoe project. However, it requires certain conditions. First, you need to own dedicated space and job-specific machinery. Secondly, you have to be clever enough to invent and build a time machine that will allow you to stretch this inexorable factor.
Making shoe lasts from scratch is so time-consuming that it makes it impractical.
If you love this part the most, it's best to focus solely on shoe last making as a career. This alone offers a wealth of things to discover and learn. For the rest of us, mere mortals living in a 24-hour cycle, a more efficient approach is to find an existing shoe last model and adapt it.
How quickly time passes while working on the lasts remains a mystery.
In my opinion, it doesn't matter whether you add extra material to the last or subtract some. Ultimately, the situation dictates. At this stage, there's no right or wrong. The difference lies in your own answer to the question of what happens next.
If I'm gluing pieces of leather onto a last, I always run it through a last copier after I'm done to get its clean, all-wood copy. Another advantage is using light to analyze the lines. Working with a solid, uniform piece of wood makes them easier to see.
Only then do I finalize the refinement process. For me, that's a sign that you're doing everything right. Work should always look beautiful and clean, regardless of given process stage.