Making Lasts and Rediscovering the computuer.

One question that continues to come up for people getting into shoe making is how to find/make lasts. Finding them is great, but it means that you need to 1) find a last. Not always easy. 2)Hope it's your size and 3)Hope that you like the style.

Granted, there's quite a few things you can do to alter a last, but still, sometimes making them may be your only option. I've altered the be-Jesus out of one last in order to get it to fit my needs, (both style and size), and I've made a pair of lasts , but they weren't particularly successful.

I'm giving it another go, this time with the instructions in George Koleff's great book. You can get it from the folks at Walrus and they are super nice.

At any rate, two things I've discovered so far as I'm working on this set of lasts. The first is that I miss working with real wood. MDF sands really well and it's easy to find, but I was looking at an antique last that I have, and it's just so much more beautiful when you can see the lines of the grain. And I can still remember the smell of the wood that used for the first lasts I made. Oh well.

The other thing that I've realized is how useful it is to employ the service of the computer. I'm a designer, so I live in Photoshop and Illustrator, but I've tended to keep those tools separate from my work with shoe design. However, in this latest round of last design, I started using illustrator to measure, plot and print patterns for the lasts. It's been a great tool. If you have it, I highly recommend using it. And by the way, it's also a great way to share patterns. Here's the insole pattern for the last I'm building.