“So, tell
us how you really feel about the book Every Lady Her Own Shoemaker, Lydia.”
Well, dear
reader. Sit yerself down for a little rant, here, about false advertising.
Perhaps you have heard of ELHOS but haven’t picked one up, perhaps you own a
copy or have a friend who will loan one to you, perhaps you’re thinking to
yourself ‘good repro shoes are pricey! How complicated could it be to get this
book and teach myself?’
Here are some
excerpts from the prologue of this book:
“No
apology is offered for presenting the present small work to the attention of
the ladies. Every lady ought to know how to make every article of clothing that
she wears….The art [of shoemaking] is so simple that it may be learned by any
person of ordinary capacity; and it is not so laborious to make a cloth shoe,
but that any lady of tolerable health, can make the whole of one without
experiencing any injury.
“The comparative ease with which we make
our own…has induced us to publish these instructions for the benefit of all the
ladies.
“The first pair of our own making
was the handsomest we ever had; no one would have suspected that they were not
made in a shop by an experienced workman.”
HA! I say and again, sir, HA!
You
see, the anonymous writer (I would want to stay anonymous too, if I was
publishing a book that would cause so much suffering to modern lay-people)
wants you to believe that shoemaking is easy, that the pros who spent decades
learning the craft were twiddling their thumbs for most of those years. They weren't. Shoemaking is not something you master in one pair of shoes, nor is it
something you master after two pairs, or three, or four, or five. Learning one
method of shoe construction (because there are at least a half dozen different
ways of constructing shoes) to perfection takes months if not years of working
at it every day, as a full time job. Even your most basic turned shoes cannot
be mastered on the first try. Also, that without injury thing – totally not
true. I hope you’re up on your tetanus shots and don’t need to worry about
getting a little blood on the leather and/or fabric. You’re working with
leather – not glove leather, sole leather, which can be almost half an inch
thick and not easy to work with – and you’re working with extremely sharp tools
(or tools that need to be extremely sharp). Don’t place any bets that you won’t
injure yourself at all.
But really my biggest complaint is
this – the book professes to be practically a For Dummies book, when in
actuality this “complete self-instructor” will leave you wondering why on earth
you haven’t produced museum quality shoes on your first try. I recommend finding
a historical shoemaker to give you advice, taking a class teaching how to make
a pair of shoes based off of ELHOS, or getting supplementation for the
instructions.
Speaking of supplementation for the
instructions… following shortly will be my supplementation, tweaked so that you’ll
be able to make a pair of mid-19th century slippers (as those seem
to be on the up and up in terms of popularity), without ripping out your hair
or ending up with junk or ruined materials.
