Shoe Project Reflection

The Sole Of a Shoe

     The idea of this shoe project was to understand the shoe's structure and how it was built. This was helpful for structural design. Designers have to understand how something -in this case, the shoe- is built in order to achieve proper and adequate movement for possible future consumers. 

     I started with the sole by layering 2 pieces of  masking tape. Tracing the soles of the pair of shoes, and pressing the adhesive sides of both together.  4 pieces had to be made for the top and bottom of the sole. for the thickness of the sole, tape was torn and crumpled. After, that, I began building up the shoe, simply by placing pieces of tape around the sole, horizontally. In order to achieve the bulb-part of the heel, the upper piece of tape was cut into slits, and bent outwards, secured by tape. Another piece of tape was bent inwards and the slits on the tape was secured together, getting the final shape. The toe box(front of the shoe) assisted in the lift of the toe. Ib was a very simple look to achieve. the two end s of the tape were bent back and taped to the top of the sole creating a loop, where the adhesive was covered by another strip, this was repeated until the entire toe bow was completed. For the top of the shoe, which appears as 3 roll-shaped pieces layered together, I did just that by pressing small pieces of tape into separate pieces and lining them on a piece of tape, then folding the piece of tape over. As I had to tape the 3 rolls (piece upon piece), they lost their shape, an awl was used to indent into the space between each attached roll. for the suede detailing, tape was again layer into a 'y' shape and 'U' shape. A small awl was used to poked (detail) holes in the sides.

     The second shoe had much improvement from the first. The basic shape of the shoe was much cleaner, and understanding what can have (negative or positive) effects on the adhesion of the tape helped me proficiently and thus efficiently construct the partner shoe. An example: on the first shoe, I used Mod Podge to get the shiny look that the actual shoe's metallic fabric has. Upon *attempting* to attach the pieces which resemble the suede panels on the shoe, they would not adhere permanently to the side. I overcame his with a fresh piece of tape with better bond- since it hadn't been on the cutting mat. Another problem I had was getting the shoe laces through the grommets.The small awl was used at first because the shoe has very small holes.but because of the difficulty that was presented when trying to lace the shoes, a hole punch was used much later. Due to the design of the shoe laces being much wider than most other shoes, aglets were added to make it easier to feed through the holes.

     Overall, it was very challenging to create a pair, because once you know what works and doesn't work, its very hard to apply that to the second shoe, without making it look drastically different. Such as certain pointers were discarded because they couldn't be applied to the first (finished) shoe, and applying them could possibly change the form of the shoe or somehow alter the viewers final perception of the piece. Its important to use 1-tone or no-tone (as in my case, Mod Podge) materials to recreate apparel. This project showed me that I didn't know as much about a shoes structure as I thought.