ARTISUN: Felt Shoes - A New Assignment

Tuesday, July 23, 2013

Felt Shoes - A New Assignment

This was a lot of work for my Intermediate 3-D kids, but the results were so worth it. I got the idea for this project from my good friend and fiber artist Lori Lawson. You can see her shoe results on her blog.

The shoe above was created by senior Sheila San Agustin and actually fits her foot! As do all the shoes and boots you will see.

That's because I had the kids use packaging tape to wrap their feet, so that each child would end up with a pattern and shoe to fit. Here are 2 of the kids doing just that. This part was so much fun LOL The kids made one cut down the back side to slip off the tape shoe. Here is what they came up with below.

Then each student took a sharpie and decided where their seams would be placed and drew a black line to represent each seam line, and cut their pattern apart along these lines; making notch lines along the edge so they would know where the edges lined up at when sewing together.

We placed the plastic patterns on white poster type board and traced around them and added 1/2" seam allowances, and any notes we thought necessary.

Then we started felting. Here is junior Josh Berger and senior Ashley Chowdhury wet felting their pieces.

As you can see we had to do it outside cuz it makes a pretty big mess. :)

Above is Sheila's felt after she was done fulling it, and below you can see how we use our dye garden as a clotheslines.

A closer look at seniors Angela Wan and Lauren De Belen's fulled pieces.

Another look at Sheila's finished shoe.

Here is Angela's low boot/shoe. Notice on all the shoes the lovely touches of embellishment with stitch, beads, charms and other goodies. Was this required, you bet!

Senior Amy Hsu's tennis shoe, so clever Amy!

And here is Ashley's finished shoe. Love, love, love the stripping she incorporated into her felt.

And Josh's boot. How much fun is this?

Another boot was done by senior Julia Faith Chanco. I really like how she couched the white trim around her edges. Also notice all Julia's seam lines to get her boot to have good structure. Making the boots was so much more challenging, but I'm so impressed with these kids critical thinking on figuring it out and making it work.

And lastly we end with senior Tiffany Lee's Rhino shoe/boot. How creative is this?? And look closely at all the bead work, the horns, ears. Absolutely wonderful! What an incredible talent.