Delay, Work, Delay, Work - Yay!

Sorry for the silence - I have been plugging away at the bike shoes, but as the title implies, I ran into a lot of delays which I'm finally recovering from.

Some of the delays were the result of some back and forth with suppliers. I'm still learning to navigate resourcing materials that are usually sourced for factories - most of these places aren't really set up for working on such a small scale. As of now, I have the materials I need, but I'll have to exercise extra amounts of caution with building all the pieces parts. The next go round, it will be smoother.

The grading process wasn't as straight-forward as I hoped, due to some inconsistencies in the lasts. So I did a lot of hand-wringing before deciding on a method to proceed with.

I've been using a combination of traditional pen on paper drafting, along with experimenting with using a vector drawing program to clean and scale them to different sizes and still maintain proportions. It's been an up and down process - especially since I'm not using a program with built-in footwear/pattern engineering parameters... someday... a person can dream, right?



Patterning can be time-consuming, but the nice thing about this design is that once I'm satisfied that the patterns are good, everything can move forward very quickly. Below are two sample uppers I'm testing to see how the patterns fit on the last. These give me enough info to tweak the patterns and begin cutting the finals towards the end of the week (btw, that's the "yay!" part).



If it continues as expected, the next update will show off some of the final uppers before they go on the last.

Until next time!

Lasts!

Haha, the lasts have finally arrived!



I was able to start the patterning process Thursday night, and I'll get into it in earnest on Saturday, when it will (hopefully) be less hot. I'll be taking the opportunity of working with multiple sizes of a single last style to try my hand at grading the patterns (generating different sizes) - due to mostly making one-offs, it's a skill that I've never had need to learn. This should also make it go faster (as I cross my fingers against jinxing things).

Also... A customer has just ordered a pair of the "Elf" last for future footwear.



Since it usually takes around a month to get lasts back from copying, they should arrive when I'm finishing up the bike shoes. If you like this style last and are interested in having a custom pair of lasts done up for you, this is the ideal time to do it so it won't take super long to start. The site is peppered with images of shoes and boots made on the Elf - look at the about page, and the portfolio page - they are the ones with the distinctive upturned toe.

FYI, I'll try to throw together a bit of a process explanation on the lasts page as a way of explaining the time lapse. Done! Let me know if it seems clear and straightforward.

Have a good weekend!