This

should look kind of familiar.

And so should this.

You’ve seen Turandot before, after all.

But there is something a little different about it this time.

That’s not my foot modeling it.

I mean… it is my foot, but… it’s not, um, my foot.

Maybe I should say, it’s My-Foot.

Here, look at it from the front:

It looks like my foot, I gotta say. But if that were really my foot, and if I could really put my hand where it is in the picture, I’d have way worse knee trouble than I do already.

The thing is, what with Rhinebeck coming up and all, I’ve been realizing that I need something I can use to display socks. Last year I made those wire-hanger sock-blocker things, and that worked reasonably well - but last year we had only five socks to show. Also, I wasn’t thrilled with the flatness. Wandering the other booths, in one of them I saw a sock nicely displayed on a mannequin foot, and I thought, that’s the thing for me! and continued so to think until I recently began to price mannequin feet and had my bubble burst in a hurry. Given the number of socks I plan to display this year, $25 a pop starts to be a very pretty - or very ugly - piece of change! Further research revealed two vendors with feet I felt I could afford, but alas, one of them carried nothing taller than ankle-high, and the other was… Out. Of. Stock. Back-ordered for at least a month.

Got in touch with a connection who works in a department store… but apparently I’d missed the boat. The displays having already changed over for the current season, the store had (and I quote) “already gotten rid of all un-needed body parts.”

So I started scrambling. Everything I came up with was either too elaborate or too expensive or too heavy or too flat-out insane. Plaster? Nope. Injection molding? Ha. Styrofoam carving? I don’t think so. At Helen’s suggestion I briefly considered trying this… but the thought of making more than one, or more than half-a-dozen, was too much for me. (Plus… have you priced duct tape lately?!?!?!)

Still, I was sure there had to be a way. I needed something quick, cheap and light-weight - and preferably something I could shove pins into so the socks wouldn’t fall down. The Boy^TM kept coming up with suggestions that involved stuffing socks, and I kept objecting that socks are too stretchy and won’t hold a shape. Then it hit me. What if you had a sock, or at any rate a mostly-sock-like object, that didn’t stretch? A sockish object tailored to the shape of a real foot, and made not out of elastic knit fabric but out of inelastic woven fabric?

I grabbed me a pen and some paper, and I started tracing the shape of my foot. Found a hunk of flour sacking and some fiberfill. Then I cut, and I pinned, and I pinned again, and I re-pinned, and I basted, and I pinned some more, and I hauled out the sewing machine and sewed for real, and I pinned some more, and I sewed some more, and I snipped, and I stuffed, and at last…

…behold! When is my foot not my foot? When it’s - My-Foot.

It still needs a little work. I need a slightly stiffer fabric - a light canvas or duck, I think - and I need to make the whole thing just a touch bigger. By the time I’d finished adjusting and snipping and darting and squeezing, I had something slightly smaller than my own 7-1/2 wide, and it doesn’t quite fill out the sock the way I’d like it to. (And if the fabric is as white-white as this, I think I’m going to get some opaque flesh-covered knee-highs to take the glare down.)

But… IT WILL WORK!!!! And once I make a proper template from this, I’ll be able to whip out a bunch of them pretty durned quick, I trust.

And I betcha ours will be the ONLY booth at Rhinebeck bedecked with replicas of My Left Foot.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 20th, 2007 at 9:36 pm and is filed under Sock Designs, Turandot, Bloggerei. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.