S andra Wheeler has always been obsessed with shoes. When she played Monopoly as a kid, she always had to be the shoe token. When she dressed up for work, she paid close attention to the shoes she picked to stand in all day. One day, fed up with the lack of comfortable high-heeled shoe options, she decided to start making them herself. “If you go to the store, you can get an old lady shoe, or you can get a stripper shoe. Not really a lot in the middle, and while both are fine in different settings, it’s nothing that I want to try to build an outfit around,” Wheeler said. “So, since I couldn’t find anything that I wanted to buy, I did have a lightning bolt of inspiration to go ahead and figure out how to do it myself.” In 2010, Wheeler began to research shoemaking and that’s when she came across Bonney & Wills School of Shoemaking and
Design in Ashland, Oregon where she studied in 2012. “It was an eight-day course and it was a full nine-hour day,” she said. When she returned from her studies, Wheeler felt confident in her dreams of being a shoemaker. “If anything, it showed me that I could move forward,” she said. Wheeler then practiced shoemaking from her home in Kansas City, working to master the art of pattern making and sewing leather. She returned to Bonney & Wills School of Shoemaking and Design in 2014 and again in 2015 to assist her instructor. She said the school taught her the entire process of shoemaking. To make shoes, Wheeler first orders the last - a foot-shaped device the material is shaped around - and other materials like kangaroo and goat skin. Then she works to create a custom insole board with three layers
Wheeler uses many different tools during the shoe making process. Here she stretches leather on a shoe form.
20 VINTAGEKC WINTER 2018
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