On importance of an experiment

From my early days in the craft, I’ve been always heavily invested in an experimentation phase of the making process. That’s the advantage of a self-taught craftsmen people. Even if you’ll get a proper training at some point, you’ll still keep that original curiousness close to your heart.

Openness of the perspective lets you constantly ask questions where, in other circumstances, you’d simply take for granted what’s been revealed to you. I feel like an experiment is the key to create something different, unique. Although in many iterations it just might not work well enough. What’s important, though, is that you’ll eventually end up with at least one idea, one technique, that will make that whole journey worth it.

I listen to other shoemaker’s interviews with attention. In one of those Daniel Wegan was talking about the fact, that at the beginning all one needs is to carefully watch the videos and pictures of other people’s work and figure out how to actually make that on your own. Coincidentally, that’s exactly how my approach was from the start. This kind of feedback is so satisfying. One gets a necessary confirmation of being on the right track to move forward ahead, armed with a double-confidence.

My regular workflow takes me through stages in a process of creating a pair of shoes as the separate stories. At most importance is the upper design, for I find that phase the hardest in execution. The bottom making is just pure fun for me. The last making is a different area in itself and definitely deserves a whole new blog post.

In my process, I fully rely on my imagination. I never make sketches, create moodboards etc. I improvise instead. The ideas come from dreams, or a daydream-like moments during my day. I see those as pictures and they almost always makes me wonder and puts forward questions regarding if it’s even possible to do that and if so, how in the world? Instances, in which those visions proves to be impossible to translate into reality are the source of a frustration sometimes.

In my future blog posts I will talk more about my experiments, so you’ll take a close-up look at my tinkering process, ideas and goals in the craft. I know I’m an original. You didn’t see yet, how many interesting construction types I’ve got in store.