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A weekend shoe-making workshop creates “lasting” memories
Photo by Joseph Tondro-Smith
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Like much of the world, shoes are both complicated and simple at the same time. This I know, because I have recently joined the slim ranks of people who have actually made a pair of shoes. And not moccasins, mind you, but real-life shoes.
I’d never really thought about making a pair of shoes. Though I’m handy enough with a sewing machine and am an able knitter, shoes were completely off my radar screen. That is, until I met Sara Mathews and Molly Grant.
In the fall of 2010, Sara and Molly were first-time exhibitors at the Western Design Conference in Jackson. They’d brought along a mountain of hand-made shoes, constructed in a variety of leathers, colors, and styles. And it wasn’t long after meeting these two women that my friend Nancy McCullough-McCoy and I discovered they offer shoe-making workshops. In no time flat, we were signed up and scheduled to travel to The Cordwainer Shop in rural New England, to make a pair of shoes with Molly and Sara.
Four months later, on our trip from Jackson to Deerfield, New Hampshire, Nancy and I joked that we hoped we’d enlisted in “shoe camp” and not “boot camp.”
Shoe Camp, Day 1: First, we had to select a shoe style and leather.
The Cordwainer Shop is steeped in history and family—perhaps steeped isn’t a strong enough word. Sara is a third-generation cordwainer. Her grandfather, Edward Mathews, started out as a door-to-door bible salesman in the 1920s, but with feet aching at the end of each day from his fashionable, pointed-toe shoes, he decided he could do better. He studied the human foot and foot health at Antioch College and began designing shoes that were both stylish and comfortable. Edward even made shoes for the likes of Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Mary Pickford, drumming up Hollywood business by continuing his door-to-door tradition at the stars’ homes—this time selling shoes.
Edward’s son, Paul, joined the business as a teenager in the 1930s. He was a dedicated cordwainer his whole life, working twelve-hour days in his workshop until just months before his death in 2009 at the age of ninety. Molly and Paul were married in 1993 and worked side-by-side throughout their marriage; now, she and Paul’s daughter, Sara, are partners in the Cordwainer Shop.
On our first day, Nancy and I were assigned perhaps our most difficult task: select a shoe style, and then pick leather from the hundreds of rolls tucked into a wall-sized rack. Molly and Sara measured our feet and adjusted the patterns, scribing the leather, which we then cut. By the end of the day, the uppers and linings of our shoes had been glued and topstitched, with holes punched where the shoes were to be sewn together the following day.
