A shoe made of rice? It might sound crazy but Julia Skergeth has mastered it and designed a beautiful shoe made up of Tilda Basmati Rice.
Julia is a MA Fashion student at Kingston University and as part of the course students have been challenged to create sustainable luxury fashion by InCrops, a company leading the commercialisation of bio-renewable materials. Julia decided to focus on alternative plant based materials but also wanted to turn the high heel shoe fashion upside down and flipped the sloping of the heel to the front. It is these two elements which caught the judges’ eyes and won her a place at the Vauxhall Fashion Scout showcase.
Keen cook Julia decided to use Tilda Basmati rice as her alternative ‘bling’ because the rice’s clean white colour and shape. So she experimented using the shape of the rice on a template, gluing on individual grains to create intricate geometric shapes. She achieved this by pouring silicon over the rice-covered shoe shape, and Julia was then left with a mould in which to place the bio-resin. “The grains of rice leave an imprint in the silicon mould which is revealed again when I fill it with bio-resin,” the 21 year old fashion designer explained. “Bio-resin dries crystal clear, so I also took the opportunity to feature the rice again by pouring it in to the liquid. Floating to the bottom, it reinforces the spiky shapes it had already created on the exterior.”
In the end Julia was left with a beautiful and unique shoe made of bio-renewable material, which hopefully will grasp the attention of designers all over the world.
However, the question on everyone’s mind was ‘how many grains were used to make the shoe?’
We have been asking you to guess over the last week and we have had many responses, anything from as little as three thousand to more than two million. But we can now announce that the shoe was made up of 13,808 individual grains of Tilda Basmati Rice!
The lucky winner is Ness Gorton who guessed that the shoe was made of 13,896 grains of rice.
Congratulation Ness and well done to everyone who participated!
