Making Monsters

A Part of the Creative Process

In 2015, I was given a pair of warm, wool slippers while I was living in Mongolia. Over the next 5 years, the soles wore down and fell off, holes developed, and at long last, they were needing to be replaced. I envisioned created a new pair of slippers made out of waxed canvas that were replicas of the old Mongolian slippers that I cherished.

I sketched out the slippers and tried to model them in CAD software. I spent hours trying to understand the new software but was only able to achieve rudimentary 3D objects.

I dedicated a whole day to measuring, cutting, and sewing the body of the slippers together. I created the sole with nice padding to give the slippers a nice cushion. The waxed canvas body seemed solid enough and I added a few accents of light brown to add to the design. I used a moldable sole that was glued on using contact cement so I could be able to walk outside. The sole was very stiff and durable.

I wore them several days and found that the sole was too stiff and heavy and the waxed canvas started to get floppy. Sadly, the shoe was just not comfortable. I left the sole with a rough cut instead of sanding it down and finishing it to a completed product. I invested hours, effort, and money trying to craft slippers, but the sunk cost didn’t stop me from tossing these monsters into the trash and buying a wonderfully crafted pair of warm slippers off of Amazon.

Creative work is a process that often feels like two steps forward and one step back. In the creative practice, we will create a thousand Frankensteins, willing them to live and be beautiful when they objectively are an army of tiny monsters. It is only through that frustrating experimentation that we ever find mastery and learn how to create objects that truly should be admired.