Thread: Some reasonably normal boots

The well known Australian cartoonist/artist Michael Leunig once wrote a poem called "My Shoe". It must be 30 odd years ago that I first read it but it somehow stuck in my mind. It goes like this...
Since I hurt my pendulum, my life is all erratic
The parrot, who was cordial, is now transmitting static
A palm collapsed, the carpet died, the cat keeps doing poo
The only thing that keeps me sane is talking to my shoe.

Can't really say I have had any good conversations with any of my shoes but once when a bit lost for inspiration for a project this poem re-surfaced in the memory.
So...instead of talking to a shoe, lets have a crack at carving one. This one is a carving of a safety boot,img004.jpgimg009.jpg a steel capped type with lace up eyelets turned from myrlte. Its got a pretty rough off the tool finish. First cut the celery top pine log into a square sided block and tried to draw an elevation and plan (from above) view onto the block. The elevation was not going to work out as the block needed to be higher to get all of the eyelets in to make it roughly scaled up....the solution was to cut a few rows of eyelets off the boot so that it would scale up. Profiles cut out with chainsaw, then arbortec wheel, then mini arbortec. Finally cleaned up a bit with chisels, no sandpaper. Boot is 620mm long. Did not fancy carving the laces (too hard) so just left them out.
The next one is a steel capped elastic sided one in king William pine (great carving timber) its about 450mm long.img012.jpg Followed by a regular Blundstone type boot also in King Billy pine and also 450mm long, only this time with the little straps that help you put them on.img010.jpg One of the galleries I know sold this one and not long after I got a commission from them from a lady whose son had died and she wanted a memento in his memory. Since the son had always worn these sort of boots she wanted a life size one, ie 1 to 1 scale. This is it in Huon pine.img011.jpg I found making one in normal size much harder than scaled up a bit, it seemed a bit more fiddly. Shortly afterwards the same gallery got another commission for a bloke who was a keen bushwalker/hiker who wanted a hiking boot. This one is also in huon pineCopy of 11-04-~1 (3).jpg with turned myrtle eyelets. Once again I have thrown the laces into the "too hard basket". I reckon it still reads like a hiking boot however if you wanted laces as well just imagine how many more hours, days, etc would be involved.
Ok, so that's it for the reasonably normal boots, look out for the next post! "Some pretty weird footwear"