Shoe pattern making and prototyping course

The Shoe Pattern making & prototyping course at Arsutoria School is designed to provide participants with the technical skills required to create accurate patterns and prototypes for footwear. With a focus on traditional craftsmanship and modern techniques, this course prepares you for a successful career in the footwear industry.

Key Features of the Shoe Pattern Making & Prototyping Course

• Hands-On Experience: Work directly with professional tools and materials to create precise patterns and realistic prototypes
• Exclusive Access to Sample Room: Arsutoria School is the only school with an internal Shoe Sample Room, where you can learn and practice using industry-standard equipment
• Small Class Sizes: Classes are limited to 20 participants, guaranteeing personalized attention and tailored support from expert instructors

This comprehensive 15-week course blends traditional pattern making techniques with modern tools, including 2D CAD modeling, and extensive hands-on training in our shoe sample room, focusing on stitching and prototyping uppers ready for lasting.

What you’ll learn

Students work with leather, microfiber, and fabrics, developing skills in pattern drawing, 2D CAD modeling, cutting, skiving, and stitching. This course, rooted in Made in Italy craftsmanship, offers unmatched technical expertise for a career in footwear.

• Women’s Footwear: Pumps, sandals, boots (low, knee, Oxford, Pull-up)
• Men’s Footwear: Derby, Oxford, moccasins, Chelsea boots
• Sneakers: Board-lasted (cemented) and Strobel constructions

This 15-week path is the evolution of our traditional training course, because it integrates the skills of creating patterns with many hours of sample room dedicated at discovering the secrets of stitching, the art that completes pattern making with prototyping the uppers ready to be lasted. A unique experience also on the Italian panorama of technical professional training in the footwear industry because it needs dedicated personnel, materials, and machinery.

The course begins with lasts, the analysis of proportions, and the knowledge of proportional measurements: the last is the first and most important component of a shoe. From the flattening of the last, the base shell is created to prepare the model, and finally the different pieces/patterns with all the technical details useful and necessary for prototyping.

We then start studying women’s footwear, the crowning achievement of Made in Italy manufacturing, often seen as an architectural feat in style. It then continues with the construction of men’s shoes, products where the artisanal orientation is still the main feature characterising high-end productions. The path ends with sneakers, a product that can no longer be classified as a trend, but which has become a genuine product category unto itself.

We have integrated 4 weeks of dedicated shoe making sessions for those who are passionate about shoe making and that want to understand how this product is technically built.

Most of the time is spent between the classroom and our shoe sample room, among paper, cardboard, microfibre, leather, and fabrics, with hours dedicated to pattern drawing, cutting, and measuring, but also skiving, preparing, and stitching.

The focus will be on traditional shoes: a ballerina, sandal and laced up and a leather made sneaker, cemented (board-lasted) with a rubber sole.

At the end of the course there will be a final exam that will test students rigorously. The Arsutoria technical diploma is highly professionalizing and internationally industry recognized therefore all students are required to demonstrate their ownership of the skills that have made Arsutoria School world-wide famous.

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