This is your chance to share photos and stories of your own footwear. Please send your pictures and memories to thesoleproject@hotmail.com and I will post as many of them as I can. Thanks!
Here’s another photo from my friend Ted:
His John Fluevog Radios (in the far right of the photo) were mixing it up with other shoes at the annual St. John’s International Women’s Film Festival party.
Thanks to Yukon photographer Cathie Archbould for sharing this photo:
Cathie writes, “These are my favourite and only boots I wear when the weather dips to minus 20 and below. Sometimes with my work I am out for hours standing and waiting for the action to occur in front of my lens, so having warm feet is a must! These are called Bunny Boots or Mickey Mouse boots and most dog mushers wear them north of 60.Here’s one from Iris in Vancouver:
I think I was 11, maybe 12, when I got my first pair of pointe shoes. I was so excited that the night I brought them home, I put them on and slept in them the entire night. Now that I think back on it they definitely weren’t comfortable but that night I dreamt of floating with a feathery lightness across a lit stage.
This photo is from Ted in Newfoundland.
Ted was sporting these great Fluevogs this past week-end in Brigus, Newfoundland. He was there for a lecture he was giving about the famous early 20th century arctic explorer Bob Bartlett. Brigus was Bartlett’s home town. I love these brogues!
Here’s a story from Lucca in Vancouver, Canada:
One of my earliest shoe stories, and unfortunately I don’t have a picture of the shoes, is about my ‘Oxfords’ that I wore in the first two years I was at school. I was what we called ‘pigeon-toed’ when I was a kid. My left foot in particular turned in as I walked. I also had a ‘lazy’ arch, not ‘flat feet’ as was originally supposed. Who would have thought that there could be so many names for the things that go on with kids’ feet!
As a result of this, it was decreed that I should wear lace-up shoes in a dark colour – I think they were navy-blue. I thought they were wretched and the ugliest shoes on the face of the earth. I wanted saddle shoes or Mary-Janes: pretty shoes with buckles instead of laces. In fact, I probably had the most sensible shoes in the school, not to mention the most comfortable feet, but I certainly didn’t see it that way.
I remember walking to the bus stop and deliberately scraping the tops of my shoes on the pavement so that they would be ruined and thus would have to be replaced with pretty shoes. I obviously didn’t know my own mother very well. She was the one in charge of footwear at our house. She wondered how on earth my shoes could get so scuffed and promptly remedied the situation with shoe polish and a good buff.
I learned about how to take care of shoes from both of my parents. Of the two, my mother was the more vocal and taught me about what she was doing. My father had all of his shoe gear in the garage and polished his shoes before he went to work. I watched. Both of them could step in a puddle and not get wet feet!
