Perhaps Blake/McKay did imitate a former hand method

General
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I was going through some notes today and realized I was missing one of the videos of George Koleff that Tim Skyrme shared on YouTube. I guess it didn’t grab my attention at the time, but it sure did today:

The most interesting part of this video for me was actually the bit right at the beginning when George emphasizes that this is a very old method. That suggests to me that there was a hand method that Blake/McKay imitated and automated, much as the later Goodyear welt process imitated handwelting.

I’d looked and looked, but the only signs I’d seen of shoes sewn this way by hand were videos of hobbyists, apparently imitating machine-made shoes. For example, here’s a hacker in Belgium who did a very early YouTube shoemaking tutorial, back when individual videos could only be a few minutes long:

Joost described his method as a variant of Blake:

So we also have another neat example of machines imitating handcraft, then handcraft imitating machines.

I suspect, don’t have great evidence to prove, that we have another example among the Mexican bootmakers who welt by hand cut cutting and turning up flaps on their insoles, like the original Goodyear insole carving machines:

Then lockstitching through the flaps with jerk needles:

Those videos are Brian Truong, who apprenticed in LA with Ignacio Palacios, born near Leon.

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Heres a couple related IG posts you nay fund interesting if you haven’t already seen them.

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Thanks for sharing! I have no idea how you would have found that Turkish one. The part showing it’s so short.

It’s really cool to be able to share things like this. At the same time, I am getting more and more annoyed with Instagram, and especially video on Instagram. I guess a lot of people just can’t see this stuff without accounts. And it’s annoying not being able to pause, step through, fast forward, rewind, or even let the video keep playing while looking at some other page. Not to mention the random music it seems to want everyone to throw on top.

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Ha yeah it is definitely suboptimal but its so popular there’s a lot of content that only exists there. If I am trying to get a good look at a video I take a screenshot recording