Spring 03 Interweave Knits had a photo and short blurb about an Italian fashion house coming out with knitted shoes. On the same page was an open invitation to readers to try their hand at knitted shoes. If you'd like to see the snaps they took and what other readers/knitters got up to, check out the shoe gallery they recently put up on their web page.

My first thought went to my wire pointe shoes. Sort of a no brainer but the idea of creating life sized shoes took hold. Next idea was to build them from the ground up but trying to locate materials to do that rapidly became frustrating. I'd still like to explore that but it hit backburner status.

So the next best option was a retrofit -- use an existing shoe base and develop a knitted upper. Between the local thrifts and my own rather remarkable collection of shoes that really should have been thrown out a long time ago, I found quite a few good candidates.

I was still thinking wire of one sort or another would be involved, but unlike with the pointe shoes where the end result was oddly organic and interactive, the base shoe plus wire upper was too rigid it lacked a certain juxtaposition.

Then came Stitches West and Habu Textiles. Takako was crocheting with wire, I was looking for rustic Japanese silk fibre and the unusual (my deserved reputation for knitting with almost anything), her stuff is amazing.

A delicate Japanese fibre, Japanese fellow fibre artist, lace was the obvious choice and a wonderful shift. So I looked at Japanese lace stitch patterns. Thanks to David MacKay who was my lace bookmark exchange partner at one point, I'd fallen in love with Japanese Feather (BW 2nd Treasury p 285) and I already had an ongoing love affair with Lotus Pattern (BW 2nd Treasury p 293).

Inspired, I found myself looking at some very vintage Evan Picone esparilles with cloth uppers. I did some cosmetic surgery. Took the cloth uppers off the base. Then I "declothed" the inserts and recovered them with some thrift gold fabric. After consult with some of my buds at my favourite artist supply store, I painted the yucko ribbon covered wedge pieces with major amounts of Gesso followed by faux gold leaf paint.

Isolating a single motif of the Lotus pattern kept me busy. My idea was to start the toe portion with a single motif and then grow to three allowing the toe portion to evolve. I added some clear beads from another thrift store find. Knit in two pieces, using the heel cup portion it was a bit less of a pain to block but the toe portion was a challenge. The blocking pics are all about the the Lotus (I'm pretty sure I have undeveloped film of the Japanese feather version somewhere).

For the Japanese feather version there are essentially two flat (bookmark wide) pieces of lace. I decided to mirror the lace pattern to allow the natural undulation to give me some symmerty. But when it came to construction, I opted for a sort of symmetrical vision. Not quite cause symmerty is over rated.