Decorative Arts: Simple footwear projects!

[labricoleuse]

My decorative arts class presented their simple footwear projects yesterday, and i have a few fun photos to share. These projects usually consist of either soft shoes, spats or gaiters, or recovering shoes.


First-year Leah Pelz made these cute spats from crocodile-embossed leather,
bias-bound in a lime/white zebra patterned cotton.


Second-year Adrienne Corral created these "steampunk-inspired" spats [1].
She altered a spat pattern to accommodate a high heeled shoe.


Left: Espadrille wedges recovered in figured cotton by undergraduate Michelle Bellamy.
Right: Pumps recovered in a houndstooth necktie silk and resoled by Wardrobe Supervisor Whitney Vaughan.


Adrienne Corral also drafted the pattern for these blue suede ghillies,
which feature a stitched sturdy leather sole as well.


[1] We had a great discussion as a result of this project about the decorative element of the gears and how their sharp teeth made them effectively unstageworthy, since they would damage skirts/tights/pant-hems and potentially injure the actor wearing them. However, steampunk style influences a lot of designers' aesthetic choices and the prospect of gears-as-decor is an entirely plausible element for costumers to potentially contend with.

How could a craftsperson accommodate a designer's request for scattered metallic gears as decor? Some ideas we came up with:

• Laminate the gears in some kind of contact paper or thermoplastic.
  
• Cast the gears into clear acrylic resin disks.
  
• Cast the gears themselves in a softer medium than brass.
  
• Screenprint the gears onto the fabric in metallic ink.
  
• Cut gear-shaped paillettes from mylar using a CDC laser cutter.

Comments

[auroraceleste.livejournal.com]

For your last, I'd say look for flywheels. Most designers (and the public) don't know the difference, but flywheels don't have teeth.

[wodhaund.livejournal.com]

The solution for the gears I most often see is embroidery. Some of what I've seen done with metallic thread is quite stunning. Obviously, it's not real gears, but at a glance and from a distance, it looks good.