These Boots Were Made For Typing: Ongoing Usefulness of Typewriters (2)

London-based shoemaker, the wonderfully creative and talented Emily Botterman, made these stylish typewritten boots in 1998, when she was just 18. Emily, who blogged under the title of "The Botterman Empire", used a Canon Starwriter 30 typewriter. Among many other things in her extensive and impressive CV, Emily was involved in making boots and shoes for movies such as Russell Crowe's Robin Hood and War Horse. These 13-inch high Crowe-Hood boots sold at auction at the end of July:

Emily explained her approach to making typewritten boots: "They were the first of three pairs I made as part of my craft subject in my final year at high school. We were given a prompt for that first project, which was ‘still life’. I can’t remember how I arrived at it, but I chose to interpret it along the lines of: When things are tough, there’s still life, full of beauty and opportunity etc. So I collected quotes I found, inspiring, comforting etc, and decided to print them into the boots.
"The word processor had a very small basic screen and it allowed the user to format, edit, change font [and] font size before printing out the page. I think I spent a long time playing around, with formatting the quotes so they would fit into the shapes of the boot pattern pieces. There was some trial and error, especially as each pattern piece had more than one quote, therefore more than one opportunity for things to go wrong!

"The leather was very thin and fit through the machine’s paper feed OK, with a piece of paper behind it, but there were some leather-paper jams! The machine did end up making a different humming noise that it did before I started!
"Once the leather was all printed, I had to be very careful while I was making the boots to keep the leather clean and to not smudge the printing. I think I must have sprayed it with some sort of fixative. I also had to be careful because the leather was thin and would rip easily."

The boots with some of Emily's lasts and tools. Below, Emily illustrates some of her processes in bootmaking: