Reed Stewart, teacher, needlepoint expert and designer,
stitches a pair of Stubbs & Wootton shoes
at the Society of the Four Arts in Palm Beach.
Andie Lindeman of Jupiter stitches Blue Dog
into a pair of Stubbs & Wootton slippers.
Tim Stepien/The Coastal Star
Society of the Four Arts class lets
students make slippers of their own
Jessica Ransom (front) stitches a pair of Stubbs & Wootton shoes at the Society of the Four Arts
in Palm Beach. She spends summers in Erie, Pa., and winters in West Palm Beach.
Stewart works with student Andie Lindeman of Jupiter Inlet Colony.
Photos by Tim Stepien/The Coastal Star
By Emily J. Minor
About four years ago, give or take, Reed Stewart started making his own shoes — yes, you heard right — and people went nuts over his original designs, everything from cigars to zebras.
“I’d be out on the island, everybody knows me, and people caught on and they were like, ‘I want a pair,’ ” he said.
So Stewart started a class, every Monday for 12 straight weeks, in a small room at the Society of the Four Arts on Palm Beach — a place well known for all things beautiful.
The goal?
Choose a design. Draw the design. Stitch the design. (Turns out Steps 1 and 2 are almost as hard as Step 3.) Then ship the canvases off to the folks at Stubbs & Wootton, the Palm Beach-based shoe designer that pretty much perfected the velvet evening slipper back in 1993, then moved onto needlepoint shoes with emblems ranging from harlequins to skulls to family crests.
And anyone who’s anyone wears a pair.
“What kind of crazy world do we live in where people walk around with family crests on their shoes?” says Stewart, 60 — a guy who loves a crazy world and who these days runs a wholesale flower business, helping pull off the grand weddings for the daughters of big-time CEOs, etc.
This class, though, was a different endeavor, in that Stewart was pulling in perfect strangers to embark on this creative mission.
Good friends with Stubbs & Wootton creator Percy Steinhart, Stewart got permission to use the company’s individually sized shoe patterns after he was approached with the idea for the class at the Society of the Four Arts. (The program director there calls him “a real renaissance man.”)
Then he landed about 10 people, all women (none of them from the island), who wanted to create their own pair of Stubbs & Wootton shoes.
“I’ve got some real expert stitchers to literally beginners,” he said. “And it’s really just about the mindset of enjoying what we’re doing.”
For starters, Stewart took the group to the society’s library, where they spent a few classes just leafing through books on art and architecture and choosing a design. Then they began drawing on their petit point canvas, using Sharpies — and a bottle of Wite-Out for corrections.
“It’s a class of creativity,” says Susan Hottle, an expert stitcher who is probably the most advanced in the class. “There are shoes to be seen in and shoes to be worn. These will be both.”
On most occasions they laughed as much as they sewed, reading glasses perched just right, everything clipped back so they could see their work. The ladies are using single-strand silk thread, with a No. 26 needle. The stitches are tiny, which means they can be plenty aggravating, and perfection seems to reign supreme.
Stewart spends a fair amount of time reassuring his students that they don’t need to rip out what they just did. All told, the shoes will be an investment of at least $1,000 or so, Stewart says, including class fees ($200), supplies ($100) and manufacturing ($600-$700).
Andie Lindeman from Jupiter Inlet Colony chose the image from George Rodrigue’s famous “Blue Dog” paintings. Anne Krauss came up with her own daffodil design. Hottle is stitching a dragon. Leila Little, who lives in West Palm Beach, drew a rendition of a Scalamandre shell fabric design.
“I wanted them to select what would make them happy when they look down at their feet,” Stewart says.
The class started in mid-January and ended last month. And guess what? The designs aren’t ready for the Stubbs & Wootton factory floor just yet.
The women, a few of them here just for the winter, will work over the summer, Stewart said, and then return in the late fall with their finished tapestries.
Hopefully.
“It’s an interesting group,” Stewart said. “And if we weren’t having fun, we weren’t doing it right.”
The Stitch Your Own Stubbs class will be offered next year, starting in January. Call 805-8562.
Want to browse the store? Visit Stubbs & Wootton, 1 Via Parigi, Palm Beach; 655-6857.
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