Bootmaker
Lisa Sorrell
One of the most decorated makers alive, competition-winning filigree inlay and handwork that gets collected like sculpture, from a one-woman shop in Oklahoma.
Related: Texas Traditions
Why collectors care
Lisa Sorrell is a one-maker Guthrie, Oklahoma bench known for pictorial inlay and overlay. Collectors meet her name on competition gold medals and on pairs that look more like sculpture than ranch stock.
She belongs under Bootmakers. There is no factory SKU line. Shop continuity and supply-house work stay on this card; they are not a second maker ID.
Biography
Her About page and the Stitchdown interview record sewing clothing at twelve and professional design work at fifteen, then a move from Missouri to Guthrie at about age twenty in 1990. She answered a newspaper ad to stitch boot tops for Jay Griffith for about a year and a half. Griffith taught the stitching job, not full bootmaking. She then stitched tops for other makers from a back room for about three years, paid Ray Dorwart for a short training stretch, and apprenticed unpaid for about eighteen months.
She opened Sorrell Custom Boots in October 1996. Craft in America prints 1995. Prefer her October 1996 date. The shop address in later profiles is 217 E. Oklahoma Avenue. PBS Craft in America: Family featured her in 2011. Daughter Paige, a shoemaker, died in 2017. Later years add fewer boot clients and the supply business Sorrell Notions and Findings.
Awards she lists include Wiesbaden International Efficiency Contest gold medals in 2010 and 2013, gold and silver Master Cup medals in 2016, Academy of Western Artists Boot Maker of the Year in 2020, Oklahoma-themed boots placed in the Oklahoma State Capitol permanent art collection in 2022, Western Design Conference leather awards in 2007 and 2011, and Boot and Saddlemaker’s Roundup Master first in 2005. Schiffer published The Art of Leather Inlay and Overlay in 2015.
Known for
Award-winning filigree inlay