[upbeat bluegrass music]
- Lisa Sorrell: Cowboy boots are an American icon.
You can show cowboy boots to almost anyone in the world
and they instantly connect that with America.
They represent America in a way that no other footwear does.
So this is the first pair of cowboy boots that I ever had.
When I was 20, my husband and I married
and we moved from Missouri to Oklahoma to Guthrie,
and I answered an ad in the paper for stitching boot tops.
I had no idea what that was,
and it was with an old man named Jay Griffith.
He was an old alcoholic and he screamed and cussed,
and I had never been around anyone who drank or cussed.
I was raised in a very conservative little church
where the ladies all wear long hair and long dresses,
so I wasn't cowboy at all.
I had never owned a pair of cowboy boots
until I got my job with Jay.
We made this pair of boots at Jay's.
At the time, I was only stitching tops,
just doing the decorative work, but now I think these boots
are just really overwhelmingly feminine.
I would never, ever want a pair of boots like that again,
but that was my first pair.
Okay, what I'm doing here
is I'm transferring the pattern onto the leather
so I'll know where to stitch.
I only drew it on half.
I folded it in half
and I stitched it with no thread in the needle,
and that gave me a series of holes.
I've applied a really thin coat of rubber cement
and that will hold my pattern on.
So I'm gonna lay this pattern here, line it up carefully.
And this is an old sock filled with baby powder.
And there's my pattern for stitching.
- Lisa and I first met in Springfield.
I had went to church there,
and after church they had ping-pong and Lisa showed up,
and I didn't know her at the time.
- I noticed him and manufactured an opportunity to meet him.
We actually met playing ping-pong
in the basement after church.
- So she played me,
and I actually had to play to keep from getting beat.
[machine whirring]
- This is called inlay.
Where you see the red, I've actually cut a leaf-shaped hole
out of the brown and I put a different color leather,
in this case red, behind and that's called inlay.
Every color is a different piece of leather
and every piece of leather has to be stitched.
The thing with leather is anytime you stitch something,
you have a hole, and so you can't make mistakes.
[machine whirring]
I used two skins of navy alligator
and they were matched skins.
They were same size, the same tile pattern and everything
because I want my vamps to match.
The vamp is the foot part of the boot.
The navy alligator is an American alligator.
It's farm-raised.
So I was cutting out the vamps.
[hammer banging]
You won't really see that white leather, the lining leather
because it's what's touching your foot,
and then the navy alligator is what you will see,
but there's actually two layers of leather in there,
the lining leather and the vamp leather.
I put them in water because I'm going to crimp the vamps next.
This right here is called a last.
This is the form that the boot is built around,
and this is a completely three-dimensional shape.
It has to make this curve and snug in here
and wrap around here and make that toe,
and so the vamp that I was cutting
is a flat piece of leather, but it has to become
this completely three-dimensional shape,
and so I'm gonna take that vamp and I'm going to crimp it.
I'm gonna put it on a, stretch it over a board
and begin giving it that shape,
and so the leather always needs to be wet when you're working it
in that way, otherwise it will have a tendency to tear.
I put the baby powder in because it helps the wet leather slide
and not stick together.
I'm crimping the vamps wrong side out
so that I can use the hammer head to rub on those wrinkles
and make sure I get them out.
Now this pair of boots, this is a pair of boots
that I took to Germany for a competition.
I entered a competition called
the International Shoe Making Days in Wiesbaden, Germany.
I was the only boot or shoe maker from America,
and so to enter in that system
and then to win a gold medal in that system
was very meaningful for me
because it kind of verified that yes,
I really have learned some things
because there's no formal way to know that here.
I love the mood of this boot.
The colors are kind of subdued, but yet the theme is spring.
The name of this boot is "If We Make It Through December."
I name all of my boots after classic country songs.
* Let's do it again
* Let's fall in love all over again *
* Spend the time that we should spend *
* Just to do it again
- Dale: As Lisa was working for Jay,
she discovered that boot making is what she wanted to do.
So she worked for Jay for about a year and a half,
and then I found a sewing machine for sale
and she started stitching tops out of our back room.
She didn't even know how to make the total boot.
She was just stitching the tops.
Other boot makers told her
all the work was always done in-house.
They was not gonna farm boot tops out
to somebody else to stitch, but lo and behold,
she was so good at stitching tops, the word got around.
People would actually go to a boot maker and say,
"I want you to make me a pair of boots,
but have Lisa stitch the tops."
She did that for three years
until she was able to hire a former student of Jay's
to teach her to make boots.
So in the beginning,
it was a lot of faith and trust that it would work out.
Most of my lasts are from the 1940s.
The really good ones are from the 1940s.
The old lasts for hand lasting are just beautiful.
Anyone can see how beautiful these are.
My favorite brands are the Krentler Brothers
and the Western Boot Last.
Each last is customized for the person's foot,
so if someone has let's see, if someone has a high instep
or they have a bunion
or they don't like the toe shape of the last,
we can change the toe,
so every last is customized for each person.
I do have to meet and personally measure every customer,
and so that's how the process begins.
Someone comes in and I sit them down and I measure their feet.
I talk to them about their feet, if they have any fitting issues,
and then I use that information to choose their last
and to fit it for their foot.
Cowboy boots don't have any lacing or buckles
or anything way to adjust the fit after you pull them on,
and so you have to have an area that fits properly,
and you can't pinch in the ball
or the next measurement will be the instep,
and some people are very sensitive there.
[gentle fiddle music]
- The church that we go to is quite small.
It used to be a one-room schoolhouse
and so it has a lot of history,
and it's just very intimate and close.
* Hallelujah
* God is love
* Paradise now helps to swell it *
* Saints on earth afar go tell it *
* Satan's host can never quell it *
* For the Lord our God is love
[gentle guitar music]
- Lisa: I'm quite proud of my two daughters.
I have Morgan, my 16-year-old and Paige, my 13-year-old.
They've both grown up in a boot shop
and I've tried to raise them to be very strong and confident.
In the church I was raised in,
the women don't have jobs,
and I wanted my girls to be confident as women.
- Yes, Paige, I'll even help you...
- Morgan is a novelist and a artist,
and I think she gets that from Lisa's side.
And Lisa and I, we're just waiting to get the next chapter
to read it, see what's gonna happen to the characters.
- I'm very, very proud of my mother.
All her life, due to the way she was raised,
she was told, "No, you're a woman.
"You can't do this.
No, you're not smart enough."
She started out stitching and making dresses,
and she took what she learned from that
and put it into stitching boot tops,
and she turned that into being a boot maker
and a successful businesswoman.
- Paige, you want to come here? - Yes.
- All right, take it away.
- I started becoming interested in working with my mom
when I was having a sleepover with my best friend.
We were both so bored
and we were just annoying my mom to no end,
so she decided we should make a bracelet.
So she cut out three strips of leather
and helped us braid it
and helped us sew the ends together and everything.
And after that, I decided I really liked making bracelets,
so she taught me how to pattern and how to cut out leather,
and from there, I just decided
I really liked working with leather.
[hammering]
I'm 13, so the fact that my mom and my sister are both artists
is really nice because it's easier to express myself,
and they understand why I like to be creative.
My dad has a business degree,
so with marketing and things like that
he is very supportive and helpful.
- When I found boot making,
it wasn't like discovering what I wanted to be.
It was like finding out who I'd been all along
and I just hadn't known.
I got to sew and be creative and be artistic,
but at the same time, I got to hammer
and it was a very physical thing,
and that appealed to me greatly
that it had this craft aspect to it,
this very hard physical labor, and I love that aspect of it.
- I think it's been said about cowboy boots, they're timeless.
It's not a throwaway product.
With custom-made anything, cowboy boots, baskets, pottery,
clothes, is just a sense of ownership and pride,
and I just feel like you treat it differently
than just something that you picked up off the shelf.
- I think craft is empowering.
I think when people have the ability to make something
or to fix something, then they're completely empowered.
It's possible for one person to make a pair of cowboy boots.
[upbeat bluegrass music]