moving. But on the other hand, you
know boots and boot makers and everything there is to know about boots.
So if I was going to move — since
you’re bringing up where I’m living
— where would I move to?’”
Either Scottsdale or Fort Worth,
Beard, who has since passed away,
told her. So the wheels began to turn
and Ferguson began to look to the
south.
The award-winning boot maker
and her family came to the Lone Star
State in spring of 1999, landing first
in Cowtown then in Southwestern
Parker County, out by the Interstate
near the Brock exit.
“We called our first Texas home
that historic hotel in the Stockyards,”
Ferguson said. “It was awesome but
(a) it was pretty full and (b) I figured
it was expensive. Then we looked at
cussions about materials and design.
Settling on the design elements, the
boot maker said, is often the most difficult part of the process. Many of her
creations are not just stitch-top boots,
but highly artistic pictorial boots incorporating various colors and shapes
and motifs — longhorns, butterflies,
galloping ponies, yellow roses, wandering morning glories, bluebonnets,
bluebirds, hummingbirds, motorcycles, playing cards, team logos,
red-topped boots bearing white Texas
shapes with “Cool” stitched inside,
“Casey James” in gold across the upper shafts. It seems the only limit to
this artisan’s ability are her clients’
imaginations. If you don’t believe
that, visit Ferguson’s Facebook page.
Asked the difference between
good and bad boots, Ferguson said,
there are so many elements to bad.
things.”
There’s a reason handmade boots
are called “custom-made.” These
one-offs are fitted to particular, not
average feet, and the fit is the result
of painstaking care in measuring and
of understanding the complexities involved in fitting a human foot — kind
of a weird-shaped thing to start with,
and no two are the same. That the
feet are the weight-bearing parts of
the body makes proper fit even harder
[and more important] to achieve.
There is no substitute for experience
here.
Ferguson began her design career
in the 1980s while in Ohio, making
custom-made men’s and women’s
sportswear, leatherwear and evening
wear. During this period, she also
worked with Amishman Eli D. Miller
who restored antique sidesaddles, first
“We have a close size, so I asked her to let me try her
boots. The bottom profile of the last, which is the shape
that your foot is sitting on, the support you’re getting from
it, that’s a big thing. I know the company sells a lot of
boots, but I couldn’t wear the things.”
as an apprentice then as an advanced
specialist.
When she turned her hand to
boots, she studied with veteran Texas
boot maker Jack Reed, who, according to his October 2004 obituary,
taught his craft of over 40 years to
some 30 students. He was 81. Over
the past 23 years Ferguson has made
hundreds of pairs of cowboy boots.
And as far as she knows, they’re all
owned by happy campers, er, cowboys.
Ferguson’s awards and achievements are many. Her work has won
prizes and been featured in numerous articles and books. To learn just
what two decades of dedication to
art looks like, please visit http://www.
stephanieferguson.com, or visit her
on Facebook.
Happy trails!
PA R K E R C O U N T Y T O D AY
All these manufactured boots, they
have a factory last [a mechanical form
that has a shape similar to that of a
human foot that is used in shoe and
bootmaking or repair] that is a run-oflast, and they’re all like scaled up and
down for the different sizes; but that
doesn’t mean that that particular size
is going to, not just fit somebody, but
be comfortable. They’re making them
for so many people that they’re just
taking an average.
She said one woman with foot
trouble brought over six pairs of manufactured boots for her to look at.
“We have a close size, so I asked
her to let me try her boots. The bottom profile of the last, which is the
shape that your foot is sitting on, the
support you’re getting from it, that’s
a big thing. I know the company sells
a lot of boots, but I couldn’t wear the
FEBRUARY 2016
Sundance Square and it was also like
fabulously awesome.”
But her mom heard about an interesting little town nestled in the low
hills west of Fort Worth — Weatherford. She thought it might be worth a
look.
“She’d read about it in some
magazine,” Ferguson recalled. “She
said, ‘There’s cutting horse stuff going
on out there.’ We found some realtor
here in Weatherford on day two and
drove around and looked at places,
found this place, and it’s exactly
where we’ve been ever since.”
Many of her clients are people
who saw her work on her customers’ feet, or who found her online —
Googled handmade cowboy boots,
etc. After finding her, the next step is
a visit to Ferguson’s Parker County
boot shop for measurements and dis-
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