A Boot Collector Feature
A Mennonite-raised seamstress who taught herself bootmaking from a magazine article, then spent three decades turning leather inlay and overlay into fine art — good enough to hang in a state capitol.
Lisa Sorrell learned to sew from her mother at age 12, growing up in a conservative Mennonite-adjacent community, and was running her own clothing business by 15. A magazine article about Deana McGuffin, one of the first women to make a name in custom cowboy bootmaking, changed her direction entirely — Sorrell moved to Oklahoma at 20 with bootmaking as the goal rather than a hobby.
She broke in by stitching boot tops for Guthrie bootmaker Jay Griffith from 1991 to 1992, then worked independently stitching tops for bootmakers around the country for several more years. In 1996, after paying for three months of formal training with bootmaker Ray Dorwart and then working as his unpaid apprentice for eighteen months — trading labor for knowledge — she opened Sorrell Custom Boots in Guthrie. An early run of fifty pairs for a single client, Jack Smith, gave her the practice that turned training into a trade.
Around 2014, Sorrell launched a second business, Sorrell Notions and Findings, selling the leather, tools, and findings other bootmakers need. That supply business has since become her primary focus, which let her raise her boot prices, drop deadlines, and take commissions only when a project genuinely interests her — a deliberate choice, by her own account, to keep bootmaking from "becoming a job" again after decades of production work.
Inlay and overlay leatherwork pushed to the level of fine art rather than decoration — intricate, often floral or pictorial pattern work set flush into the leather (inlay) or built up on top of it (overlay), finished with precise hand topstitching. Sorrell treats a boot's design the same way a painter treats a canvas, planning each piece's layering in advance: what goes over, and what goes under. She published a book on the subject, The Art of Leather Inlay and Overlay, in 2015, and her work has been recognized with multiple gold medals at the International Efficiency Contest of the Shoemaker's Trade in Germany, Boot Maker of the Year from the Academy of Western Artists in 2020, and a pair of her boots entering the Oklahoma State Capitol's permanent art collection in 2022. She and her work were also featured on the PBS series Craft in America in 2011.
"You have to think about it, what's gonna go over and what's gonna go under."Lisa Sorrell, on planning inlay and overlay layering
Sorrell's influence has also reached bootmakers who never set foot in her shop: Oklahoma City's self-taught Josh Duvall credits her instructional DVD series, alongside D.W. Frommer's book, as part of how he learned the trade starting in 2015.
From stitching other bootmakers' tops to boots in a state capitol's art collection — proof that inlay and overlay can be fine art, not just decoration.
See more at customboots.net