Showing posts with label create any shoe design. Show all posts
Showing posts with label create any shoe design. Show all posts

Jun 12, 2014

4 Design Solutions That Will Make Your Shoes Look Better




It take time to get better in any craft, in any work, practice, practice and then more practice. That is true and you can't go around it, you don't wake up one day to be a professional shoemaker, it takes time, but what can we do until then?

In today's post I will show how you, using design can fix already made mistakes with your shoes and how using design you can prevent issues that you struggle with during your shoemaking process.

During my work as a designer and design courses that I do, I figured out that people have wrong perception of what design is.

Design is not about making cute and pretty drawings of shoes, you been misled and missing the most important point that can help you in your process.

Design is a technical plan for your footwear construction. It's about knowing how technically you can and should construct your shoes, how each part should be connected so your shoes will be wearable, comfortable and beautiful.

If design is a technical thing that means that you can adjust your design to help you, to be your solution to get better looking shoes.

Design solutions 

1. Topline inside seam - If your sewing skills slowing you down and your top line seam always has curved waves, which sure don't compliment your shoes, make an inside seam.
Sew your upper from the inside and then just turn it over, this way if you even made a curve line you still can adjust it without anyone knowing it's there.

2. Welted strip- When you stumble upon situation, where you made not so accurate, not very clean work with your outsole, not a good job in general!

Maybe you sand the bottom to much or if after attaching the outsole you usually can see the glue or you always skive it to much. The solution is simple, create welted strip and attach it to your bottom, the strip will hide any mistake that you usually make there.

You can plan it from the start or you can adjust your design if this situation occurs.

3. Elastic bend solution- I personally love to use elastic bands in my footwear just because it gives so many options to what you can do.

But, if you have a very wide last and no matter what you do your topline is always lose, first make sure that the problem is with your wide last and not mistake that you made with your pattern.

The solution is, to place elastic band inside your topline, it will tight up the upper and it will sit perfectly on the foot.

4. Lasting ripped- Lasting is a difficult process and you do need to practice to do it well. When using very thin upper, during lasing you can over do it.


It happens, especially when you are a beginner and you eager to make perfectly fit shoes.
You don't need to start all over again, just change the design. You can make toe cap shoes.

It will always be elegant and fashionable shoes. Create new toe pattern, cut the unnecessary front part, skive it and stitch it together.

The wonderful thing about design technical solutions that they are very creative and will make your footwear to look great.


I will think of more design solution and will share them on my Twitter, so follow me on twitter to get more design updates and not just, for the last month twitter became kind of my ideas writing tool, so get in touch on twitter.




 Let's see what you think in the comment below.

Have a great weekend 

Sveta Kletina

Oct 5, 2013

The Secret Material That Will Help You To Change Your Last Form




Finaly my shoemaking courses online started and now I have very busy daily schedule. I am not technical person and in the first week of courses I had too much unexpected technical issues that just got me off balance. One note to myself for the future, always work with professionals, it will save you a lot of time and health. Don’t worry I finally got on the right track with the help of my wonderful husband and everything working as I planned, in a very fast mode, but important thing is that it is working! In one of the first lessons that I made on the shoemaking platform I talk about one of the most wonderful materials that I found and use for shoemaking purposes and I want to mention it here on my blog as a treasure tip for all you shoemakers.
This wonderful material as epoxy glue. / A very useful update to this post! It called epoxy putty in US and you can find it in Home depot. Thank you Natasha/ It's soft like clay, and when you mix it well it becomes solid like a rock. Honestly this material is not intended for use in the footwear industry, but I found it very useful when
you have only one type of last and want to work with another last. For example you have round toe last and dream about pointy toe last to make classical pointy shoes. So in this situation the epoxy glue will be a perfect solution for you to change your last with it. The greatest thing that actually drove me to make an entire course about it is, that you can remove it from your last when you don't want pointy toe last anymore. It is removable, and that is what important. After it, if you want to change your rounded toe last to the square toe last, you can do it as well. Sure there is a method and technique working with this material, and you need to know how to make both lasts (right and left) identical , and I show it in my course.
I personally use the epoxy glue very often in my work when I want to experiment with
shapes of my existing lasts and change them. That’s why the first lesson in advanced level of my shoemaking courses I dedicated to this so useful and great ,in my opinion , theme. This method of changing you last's design will open your mind about the possibilities that you have with your existing last and you will have the appetite to create sometimes even bizarre forms of last ,as it happened to me. For example, I want to show you some of them, that I made first with epoxy glue and then copied them in plastic for bigger scale manufacturing.





This is the example of shoe design which I made for this "crazy" last.




It's only the beginning of my big program that I planned for my courses. During creating of each lesson I constantly emerging new ideas for courses, so stay in touch!

Do your last looks boring to you? What would you like to do with your last? What form would you like to create. Share your thoughts bellow in a comment, what last or shoes would you really want to create?



Please Visit The Only Shoemaking Courses Online Platform at: www.shoemakingcoursesonline.com


Have a great weekend,

Aug 20, 2013

Shoemaking Online Courses Registration Is Now Open!



Three weeks have passed since my last post and the reason for that is that I was a very busy bee, and this time it's all doing with MAKING SHOES BLOG. Now when my collection is ready and it's on a roll, I am fully committed to you my dear readers.
In my last post I announced that I'm planning an online shoemaking courses, and the feedback that I got from all of you was incredible, you helped me understand what courses are needed, and some of them were way far from my primary plan. Since then I'm tightly working on the courses, and they building up in this massive stream of content that I'm very confident and excited about.
So, here we are three weeks later and I'm super stoked to announce


MAKING SHOES ONLINE COURSES REGISTRATION IS NOW OPEN

Jul 9, 2013

Day 2: How to adopt your design to Golden points by bending some rules?


 

Knowing the gold points is surely makes your life as designer or shoemaker much easier but knowing them, memorizing them will not solve your problem unless you making the same boot over and over again. You must know how to use this knowledge, to create your own formulas, because each design that you may have will extend the possibilities that those points gives you, and you need to know how to fix it. One thing for sure, it comes with experience and creative approach, not to mention other aspects that are influence your design, like type and correctness of the last you use, type of leather, it could be too thick, to stretched, no stretched the best advice I can give you is, learn it, use it, make it your own.

Here are couple questions and answers that emerged from the book:

  •  How to stay in the safe area (golden points) but exceed the classic last borders. (from chapter 2 , 4)

Visually divide the last into equal segments, so you will be able to work in the last proportions:

For example: Let's say I want to make asymmetric Channel shoes with geometric forms in the pattern. To do it I visually divided the last into 4 even segments, that are created by lines LM,KK1 ( middle of the last length), FC.

By creating volume in the heel( 2 segments- LM, KK1) I need to make this volume equal in other two segments KK1, CF according to the geometric forms of the pattern.



As you see, by doing this I work according to the rules of Golden points and I divide the last into proportional segments that are helping me to extend the boundaries of the last and in the same time staying in the last proportions. That's what I call bending the rules.

  •  Selectively chose the gold points that you need to work with your design 

Jul 8, 2013

Shoemaking Marathon Week: Day One


After a lot of writing and answering questions for the past week, I decided that few actions need to be done. A lot of questions regarding the "Shoemaking & Techniques for Creative Footwear Design" book evolved in areas and directions that I didn't thought of them , but it is alright and I'm here to explore the book more thoroughly.
Because, nobody wants to read this post for an hour, and because I didn't wrote everything yet, and still thinking of how to explain some of the questions that you asked me or you may ask in the future, we will do it a whole week.
Here is what we will be exploring for the next three days:



* Day one: The most asked about chapter is chapter 2, the "Golden points". So, for the day one (today) I will be doing tutorial on" How to properly construct the Boot pattern according to gold points". 



* Day two : (Hello chapter 2, again) " How to adopt your design to Golden points by bending some rules". This one is for those of you who struggle with strict rules of pattern making. When your vision of design is way different from what the golden points are, and you know that if you break them, you will have some issues with your shoes. I will show you how to fix it in more creative and professional way.

* Day three: Since the chapter 6, (How to build an entire collection just with 2 types of lasts) "made the day" for some of you and that fact made my day as well, I wanted to extend this chapter ideas and that's what we going to do on the third day, " How to transform your sandal last into platform sandal last".

This is the schedule for next three days, and the rest will be updated, you are welcome to add your own questions that you had from the book, and I will try to include them as well.

Jun 23, 2013

Shoemaking with Freehand Pattern Construction Technique



Today we going up a notch,  and I want  introduce you to my "FREEHAND PATTERN CONSTRUCTION TECHNIQUE"  that I developed . I work with this technique and for a very long time , this is the only way I design and construct my patterns, do to one important reason, I can build almost any design that I desire with this technique. Try to think about this technique as you just purchased  a 3D printer and this machine can make your wildest designs.  
 It will be an almost impossible to explain all the technique in this post, but I just wanted to open your mind to the possibilities, because I sincerely use it in my work . In my opinion this is the best approach to shoe design, because it gives me much more possibilities in making creative patterns for shoes.   It promotes an understanding of the shoes as a whole object, which is based on engineering laws, and does not consist of separate parts, as in decorative  design .

I describe the design through pattern more particular in my book and how I use this method to make more creative designs. Here is a short tutorial that is just a little taste of what you can do with "FREEHAND PATTERN CONSTRUCTION TECHNIQUE". In this tutorial I will show you how I transform pump shoes into half pumps- half boots.



Have a nice week!


If this post was useful for you and you think you can integrate it in to your work, share this post to fallow shoemaker and post comment bellow.













Apr 2, 2013

Creative Pattern Making As a Key For Wining Design


This post is all about my new book that is coming out by the end of next week, which I'm very excited about. I'm very confident and thrilled about this one, because it has to do more on my field of expertise that is footwear design.

As my experience taught me, the best designs are emerges from creative pattern making. In this book I will give away my best tips on how to create any shoe design, from creatively approaching pattern making if you want to build entire collection or just a shoe for yourself and much more. I will probably place more updated information about the book, before launching it on the blog, so stay tune.
More than that, I finally updated my last collection, so I wanted to share this one with you as well. The concept behind it and what inspired me to create it the way it is.  


ABOUT  "REVEAL RAW" 
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