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

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" 

Why is it important to know how to make the classic model of shoes?

When I studied at the Art Academy in Jerusalem, I was very fond of classical drawing lessons, because I understood that in the future  for  me to be able to draw any of  my fantasy figure, I must first learn the basics. So, in whatever  you touch upon, in any field, you must first learn the basics of the subject, in which you would like to achieve perfection. At the shoe craftsmanship such a basis, in my opinion, is the study of all the classic shoe models based on which you can make any shoe.

So to be a designer that is not only "creates" and by that I mean "makes a pretty drawing on a paper", but also can really make any of his ideas, it is important to know the construction of the classic shoe models. While I personally have never made any classic model of shoes (in a his "clean definition") in my own collections, I have all my models designed only because my knowledge on how to structure classic models of shoes. Those  models as they are, in terms of design, don't interest me, but the knowledge of their design gives me the freedom to create. They, like the alphabet, for those who wish to be a writer.