It is a pleasure to introduce a pair of woven shoes crafted by Donna Sakamoto Crispin, a fiber artist in Eugene, Oregon.  Donna is a friend of the Straw Sandals Project with whom I connected through Facebook.  She has made some remarkable pieces using woven materials, handmade paper and combinations of natural materials.  Friend Donna on her Facebook page to see some of her creations.  A third generation Japanese-American, Donna incorporates Japanese craft traditions into many of her fiber art works.  This inspiration can be seen in the woven shoes she recently completed, shown here:

Several archaeologists have expressed the idea that of all human artifacts, the rich detail preserved in woven baskets and shoes provides us the most detailed view of the mental decisions and memory of the weaver.  I first read this notion in James M. Adovasio’s book Basketry Technology: A Guide to Identification and Analysis along with my favorite descriptor of woven foot wear, straw sandals are baskets for the feet.  As I plan to describe in a future post, how and why Donna chose the materials used to make these shoes and the decisions she made in their construction, gives us a contemporary example of how the mind of the weaver is reflected in the shoes she wove.  We may have a better understanding for example of the mind of the ancient weaver who crafted about ten thousand years ago the Fort Rock sandals found in a cave in central Oregon by Luther S. Cressman, father of Oregon anthropology.  Remarkably, these sandals are now in the University Oregon Natural History Museum in Eugene, the same city in which Donna wove these lovely shoes.

When I started collecting straw sandals, it did not dawn on me that I would become involved in Chinese shoes for bound feet. After all, straw sandals were the shoes of the farmers, peasants and a few monks living alone in the mountains.  Shoes for bound feet were for the elite families who could afford to bind their daughters’ feet, i.e. the wealthy folks along with courtesans and concubines, or so I thought.  Then I found a pair of straw shoes on-line that were very clearly shaped like shoes for bound feet.  These shoes were probably not from poor farm families or rural peasants.  Several different types of materials were used, which would have been costly, and these shoes exhibited multiple layers of high quality weaving.  I set them aside because I simply did not understand where they fit into the footwear from China.  I did start reading about foot binding in Chinese culture and history.  It was after reading several books by Dorothy Ko, a history professor at Columbia University, that I began to understand more about these shoes, C16 in the collection, shown below.  Professor Ko has specialized in the history of women in Chinese culture and foot binding in particular.  The key lesson provided me by Dr. Ko is that during the roughly 1,000 years of foot binding in China, it changed over time in terms of who practiced it, how and where it was done, and the reasons why.  By the 19^th century people in rural areas including farm families were binding their daughters’ feet.  My seller estimated that the C16 shoes were made between 1850-1899.  Let me share with you a couple of additional insights from colleagues who have visited the collection.  My friend and fellow curator Ruixing Lu, about whom I have written on several occasions, told me that these shoes indeed belonged to a woman from a well-to-do family.  The quality of the weaving and materials used were not in reach of poor rural women.  He suggested that perhaps they had once belonged to the wife of a wealthy landowner.  Then recently, my colleague Ping Zhang visited, saw these shoes, and exclaimed “These are like my grandmother wore”.   He told me that she had lived in the south of China and that her family owned a number of fish ponds that made them wealthy.  And yes, she had bound feet, also confirming Ruixing’s conclusions.

As I mentioned in an earlier news post, I searched for woven sandals  and shoes from the Ladakh Region of Northern India for about five years without luck.  Then a chance conversation with my colleague Pierre Goloubinoff resulted in the first pair contributed to the SSP collection (Item I-4).  Wait until I tell you this next story involving Pierre.  The story begins on Sunday, July 28, 2013, when I received an email message from another friend, colleague and fellow world traveler, Phil Hooper.  His longtime friend Cynthia Hunt, founder of The Help Fund and HEALTH Inc, had sent him some pictures from Ladakh and Phil had forwarded them to me.  Phil recalled my interest in shoes from that region and Cynthia had lived and worked there for thirty years.  Among the images were hand crafted shoes made from straw and woven yak wool locally dyed.  Here are a few of the images (click on images to enlarge):

I immediately wrote back to Phil to say that I would love to have a pair of these shoes for the collection.  Yes, he would ask Cynthia about this possibility.  Here is where Pierre enters the story.  I knew that Pierre and his daughter were in Ladakh again that summer in and around the city of Leh, and he was keeping a watchful eye for woven shoes and sandals.  On Wednesday, July 31, Pierre sent me a brief message:  “Dear Larry,  I just found an hour ago in the market of Leh a couple of hand made straw shoes (bottom made of straw and the rest of yak wool) from a village in the Nubra valley, which is on the southernmost branch of the Silk Road….”   Could it possibly be?  I immediately sent Pierre the shoe image from Cynthia that Phil had sent me.  I noted in the message that “It seems to be a magical time for me linking to this part of the world!”  On Thursday morning, I opened my email page and there was Pierre’s reply:  “This is it exactly! I will bring them to Sheffield.  Hold your breath!”  Here are images of the shoes that Pierre found for me in one of the most remote regions of our planet:

To give you an idea of the size of the shoes, here are some dimensions:  For the sole, width across the heel is 7.3 cm, widest part, at the part where sole starts to turn up is 9.0 cm and the length is 37 cm.  The inside width at the heel is 6.0 cm and the useable length inside the shoe is 20 cm.

Here is a little information about the Nubra Valley, where these shoes were made.  Nubra is a  high altitude desert, essentially Tibetan Plateau, with an average altitude of 10,000 ft (about 3,000 meters).  Its capital of Diskit is about 150 km north of Leh, the capital of the Ladakh District, in the state of Jammu and Kashmir, India. Most inhabitants of the valley speak the Nubra dialect or Nubra Skat and they are mostly Buddhists.  The land along the river beds is fertile and irrigated, producing a variety of grains, fruits and nuts.  Other parts of the valley present a forbidding landscape.  Interestingly, nomads and camaliers wore shoes turned up at the toes to ease walking in sand.  Perhaps this functionality is a source for the design of these remarkable shoes.

Another coincidence emerged as I prepared this news post, again involving Pierre.  During his visit along with his two daughters to Leh during the summer of 2013, he happened to walk into a Nepali cafe in the city, only to find a colleague from the cell stress and chaperones research field.  It was Wilbert Boelens from the Netherlands.  Wilbert visited the Nubra Valley during his touring in the Ladakh region and he took some remarkable photos.  I am very happy to present some of these images below with Wilbert’s permission:

Sand dunes on the floor of the Nubra Valley

Bactrian camels resting

Diskit Monastery

Statue of a giant Buddha on the valley floor

Several visitors have asked me about videos demonstrating weaving methods for straw sandals.  I have collected a number of them on YouTube over the past few years.  I thought it would be helpful to create a menu item called YouTube for visitors to link to my playlist Shoe/Sandal Making.  The link is active and ready for you to use.  There are additional video located under the menu item About – Resources – Videos.

I began searching for woven shoes like these in 2007 after reading Jutta Jain-Neubauer’s beautiful and informative book titled Feet & Footwear in Indian Culture.  The first breakthrough came from my colleague Pierre Goloubinoff who delivered to me a pair of woven shoes from the Leh District of northern India in November of 2012 (see earlier News item). The woven slippers shown below will become item# Np-1 in the collection.  I purchased them on Ebay from the store gaguska4. Through email discussion with Zoja, the seller, I learned that these slippers were discovered at a street fair in Manhattan, NYC.  The merchant appeared to be for the Himalayan region, perhaps Nepal, Tibet or India, according to Zoja.  Peirre had seen shoes like these in a shop in Leh that sold goods from Nepal.  This description fits well with information in the Jain-Neubauer book.  They are woven by local peoples, the Newars or Newa People (on page 165 of the Jain-Neubzuer book) living in valleys in the foothills of the Himalayas extending from Nepal to northern Pakistan.  Newar and Nepal are different linguistic forms of the same root word for the ancient inhabitants of the Kathmandu Valley. Local straw and grasses are used including a long grass named lambchua.  This grass is processed to create a soft, pliable fiber.  Two-ply S-twisted cords are used for the sole warps and the soft fibrous chords are used for the wefts of the sole.  The main material used for the vamps is a grass named charas.  Long, soft fibers are produced from the inner bark or bast.  The natural color is beige but some of these fibers are dyed, usually orange, pink, green, red and blue, to provide decorative elements for the vamp.

Newar marriage celebration, Nepal, Photo by Krish Dulal