[upbeat accordion music]
- I always liked wood carving.
I did whittling and stuff as a little kid.
I'd met a guy named Bob Siegel
who was a master wooden shoe carver,
who taught me how to carve.
So when I saw Bob doing this,
and it was something he needed help with,
I just kind of figured "I have nothing happening right now,
so I might as well help him out and see what happens."
And 14 years later, here we are. [laughs]
My name is Luke Traver and I am a wooden shoe carver.
I carve wooden shoes at events for basically the public,
to see the demonstration
and see how this has been done throughout the centuries.
So the wooden shoe, or the klompen,
is originally a Dutch shoe.
As they were working in the fields,
their leather shoes constantly rotted out on 'em.
And they always had wet feet.
So somebody thought about carving up a wooden shoe,
which allowed them to work in a field all day long.
And at the end of the day,
they can put the shoe by the back door
and it would dry out overnight.
And they could have a dry shoe for the next day.
I only know of one other person that does this in America,
who lives in Holland, Michigan.
And he only comes out for the one show a year that he carves.
I haven't actually met him.
Otherwise, I don't actually know anybody else
who does carve shoes.
You start off fast and furious, just knocking stuff out,
getting as much into it, throwing in the power.
And that's really how,
if you're ever gonna draw anybody's attention in,
you can have somebody walking 10, 20 feet away,
you start axing on a chunk of wood,
and they're gonna spin their head on a swivel
and figure out what's going on.
Works every time. [chuckles]
And then by the end of it, you really are, kind of...
you're messing with, you know, half inches and little things.
You're looking up to light
and seeing if you see the light coming through.
And if you're quite there or not.
And you have to be really delicate by the end of it.
Getting the arch in the right place,
and getting the right height arch,
getting enough space for everything to fit just right.
It kinda... it gets really tricky.
A lot of it is skill,
but there is a little bit of luck of the wood as well.
I love the concept,
also that I can, you know, take a chunk of wood
and turn it into a shoe.
It's something that's still usable, and still practical.
When you get it right and you make a good shoe,
I mean, it's awesome.
Because you can make eight shoes in a day.
You know, a shoe every hour.
And you can have two or three of them turn out.
And it's just the greatest.
[upbeat accordion music]