lets make a shoe?

So we had our first lesson with the woman that will be helping us make our sandal a week last monday and ive finally got around to writing it up (sitting in a band meeting with 4 boys will push you to resorting to such levels).. i was scared about this first lesson as we had previously been told about a month ago to postpone any work on our olympian sandal projects and concentrate on our lasercutting projects as our lecturers hadnt sorted out a footwear specialist to come in and help us make them, so i had completely abandoned work and hadnt got any shoe designs to show ! She was very helpful to each and everyone of us and tried to give us as many ideas as possible to start to get us all more inspired by this project as i dont think any of the group were really feeling it as deadlines are mounting up and we had had too much time off of it. I especially was feeling very confused by the project and had been from the start; although liberty is an amazing store and there patterns and prints are what i myself am interested in, for footwear i found it confusing to translate this into a shoe. I knew i would have to have a shoe that was mainly influenced by pattern but didnt know how to go about this and unlike other people in my class whos designers have a key 'style' as in structure, feminitity, new age.. Liberty is much more a 'store' and stocks other designers clothes/shoes so for a shoe silhouette it was particularly difficult. However the lady helped me see that i could begin to take liberty prints/incorporate my own ideas into them and begin to look at cutting the shapes out of the leather and then i began to think of cutting big shapes out of the leather; shapes of a liberty print? and then underneath have a 'backing fabric' that is screenprinted in my pattern although not under every section as obviously a sandal needs to be breathable. So as you can see talking to her really helped to get my creative juices flowing, i think it is vital to have appointments/one on ones to get feedback and begin to bounce ideas off professionals to learn from them and understand different directions to go in and different ways to work in/percieve things, something that is provided on this course which is crucial i believe in students developing their skills and hopefully progressing through second and third year we'll be begin to take on everything we've been told in first year and start needing less and less instructions on how to take our work and just have critique and feedback.
Also in this lesson we had to choose a shoe 'template' which was 3d and basically a shoe and we had to pick one that we wanted to use for our sandal. They came in a variety of shapes and sizes, with or without heels and then with different height heels. I decided to pick a flat sandal as i want to concentrate more on the pattern and fabric that goes on the sandal and keep the structure of the actual shoe very simplistic.