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.