Skips

I've been totally obsessing over having a pair of shoes made for months. I found this woman on etsy a couple of years ago and have been coveting a pair of skips from her ever since. I mean, are these not the cutest things ever?

She makes heaps of things, and admittedly, I'm not so much into the pointy toe end of the spectrum, but these? I lovelovelove the two on top. Love. LOVE.

But as with things like this, it's tough to get into the queue to have them made. I check her site often, hoping that exactly the pair I want will pop up in my size, in the color I'm looking for. Thus far, it hasn't happened, though it's been close a couple of times. I've been right on the verge of buying more than once, thinking, well, Toffee is close to Marmite, right? (It totally isn't). And then I catch myself at the last minute, telling myself, no, no, I'll try to get into the bespoke queue. But, you know, she's a one woman operation, and you can only make so many shoes a month, so she only takes so many orders. I sat, poised, at my computer at the start of the month, waiting for the queue to open, and...... denied. I was suddenly transported back to my youth, obsessively calling over and over and over, hoping to sneak into ticketmaster's phone lines to pick up those seats to see U2. I never did get to see them.

Part of my obsession with these shoes is that the internets make it possible for me to be looking at them at 3am when insomnia takes over. And they are not the only pair of bespoke shoes over which I obsess. These, for example, I covet deeply. And part of it is that I have wanted, for many many many years, to learn how to make shoes. Where does one pick up this skill? I remember going to a shop on Ludlow Street in the city, years ago (years after I'd lived on the street, but around the time when it started to become a hipster paradise), and there was a woman there who would make bespoke shoes. She was in the back shaping stacked leather heels on a gorgeous pair of shoes, and it suddenly occured to me that learning to make shoes was a possiblity that existed in the universe. I've just never been able to figure out where, exactly.

Of course, even if I were to find a place to learn this skill, I'm sure it would take years and years to figure out how to make anything cute and wearable. So I'm back to trying to get into the bespoke queue.