Last making
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 really enjoy doing. Whenever I take a block of raw wood in my hands, the imagination starts to speak in secret alphabets, the fingers weave quick minarets… If you catch my drift here.
I only get into it, when I already have the shoe design in mind. It has to be clear enough to adapt the shapes and details properly. With a sandpaper in hand, applying that final touches, working through angles and edges, I feel tremendous excitement about what is coming as a next step.
I dream and think over the project obsessively. From that point, it is merely a matter of time and elbow grease. The vision finally comes to fruition.
This is exactly the reason why it is so important to be a one-man operation. In no other circumstances it is possible to achieve that level of integrity and continuity of the production process.
I’ve made this particular pair of lasts for my forthcoming women’s wholecut, a project that will be revealed in July. The design is original and unique - as per usual with me - but it also features a new construction type this time around. In all honesty, I didn’t see anywhere else that kind of solution, but keep in mind that I’m barely a human being. At this point in time, it exists only in my head, as far as I’m concerned. I’m not even a one hundred per cent sure if it’s gonna work well. That’s just how I roll, though. It’s an experiment and you already know how I view that kind of things, right?
So, what do I do to complete that task? At my beginnings, I did manage to produce a pair of lasts and a shoe trees out of a block of raw wood. That’s because I was that curious and ambitious, regarding that whole process. One certainly can go that way every time. That demands a certain conditions, though. First of all - you have to own a proper space and machine park. Second of all - you have to be smart enough to invent and make yourself a time machine, in order to stretch that merciless factor.
Last making from scratch is so time-consuming, it makes it impractical for a bespoke shoemaker.
If one loves that part the most, it would be best to focus solely on last making as one’s career path. There’s more than plenty to discover and learn there alone. For the rest of us, the mere mortals living in 24-hours-long span of the day, the more efficient way is to find the existing last model and re-adjust it.
How time flies while working on a pair of lasts is an ultimate mystery.
In my opinion, it doesn’t matter if you add an extra material to the last or subtract some of it. It is dictated by the given situation after all. There’s no rights or wrongs at that stage. What makes the difference is your own answer to the question of what happens next.
When I’m done, I always put my work into a last copying machine to get the wood-only, clean version in the result. An additional advantage is the use of light to see the lines. Working with a solid, unified piece of wood, lets you notice those more easily. Only then I finalize the process of a fine-tuning. To me, that’s the sign of doing things right. The work always should look nice and clean, no matter what you do in the process of shoemaking.