Glass slippers exhibit versus the best handmade shoes you have never heard off

In Kassel, Germany, there is an exhibit of "art shoes" under way.

As our resident fashionista brought up photos on the screen, disappointment set in. Sure, a piece of footwear that looks like a stripper shoe wrapped in gold webbing may be art, but my three year old produces that kind of art all the time - without making headlines or getting her own exhibition.

We'd love to see a show of wearable art shoes, where the traditional craft meets imaginative design.

The artisans or artists who work out of a basement or an old trailer and give us wonderfully comfy shoes that will make people stop you in the street. Like Catskill Mountain Moccasins on the  East Coast or Walking Liberty Moccasins out of Oregon.

I have experienced it multiple times as I wandered around the city. Almost always at a traffic light, when I waited to cross. Either someone who had walked up next to me, or someone who was crossing from the opposite side, would stop me.

Excuse me, can I ask you where you got these shoes?

A friend of mine made them.

They look great.

She will make shoes based on your design, you can get very creative with boots.

I would give them the email address of Sharon the Shoemaker, and they would disappear in the crowd or between the concrete of the buildings.

The hip and the wealthy will pay a thousand dollars or more for custom shoes, and when I explained that my shoes were about 150 dollars, including the tube sock and duct tape mold Sharon makes, everybody was surprised.

You might find Sharon the Shoemaker and a couple of similar craftspeople at the High Sierra Music Festival in California, say hi.

The internet presence of these folks is pretty much non-existent, so go look for them the old fashioned way. Etsy has some "kind of like that" but really a far cry from the best ones.

As to my first pair of loafers, they work wonders when that old knee injury acts up. The Doc Martin's come off, and the custom shoes come on -- the pain goes away and stays away for months after just a day or so in these shoes.

It's a lazy Easter day, so photos need to wait until a future post.