DIY: Princess Shoes.
Instead of throwing away a worn out, once beloved pair of shoes, give them a new life. This is an easy DIY that anybody can do. I happened to have all of the materials on hand and I imagine you might have many of them as well. If not, all the materials are very inexpensive and easy to find.
What You’ll Need:
- A pair of old shoes. The ones I used were an old pair of my shoes that had seen better days. You could also get a pair at a thrift store.
- Acrylic medium. I used to paint with acrylic paint so I had this Golden Matte Medium sitting around, but you could use Modge Podge or some other type of medium.
- Glitter! I chose silver, blue, and green glitter for my shoes, but I think it would also be fun to have rainbow glitter or just one type of glitter.
- A bowl for mixing the glitter mixture.
- A paintbrush you are not particularly attached to. If you wash your brush right away it’ll be fine, but there’s a chance you could mess your brush up.
Making the glitter mixture:
Mix the medium and glitter in the bowl until you have a consistency that feels good to you. I used about 2/3 medium and 1/3 glitter. It will be a little thicker than pancake batter. It won’t look very shiny once it’s mixed up, but it will become sparkly again once it dries.
Cover all the parts of the shoes you want to be sparkly. This could be the entire body of the shoe or just a small detail. I left the brown border around the top of my shoe unglittered.
(Optional) Make A Bow:
- Find a pretty ribbon. I found a grey/blue velvet ribbon in the back of my ribbon box.
- Figure out what size bow you’d like on your shoes, crazy big or dainty?
- Fold over one side of the ribbon for one of the sides of the bow, then fold over another bit that is equally sized to the first side. Cut the ribbon.
- Cut another small piece of ribbon to wrap around the middle of the bow.
- Sew the bow together. I used just once stitch all the way through in a similar color as the ribbon, but I imagine it would look lovely if the thread was in a contrasting color and made an x (cross stitch).
- Make sure your bow is secure. It would suck if the bow fell apart while you were dancing in your fancy new shoes.
- Attach the bow to your shoe with your needle and thread. If your shoe is leather or pleather this might prove to be too difficult.
You could also attach other pretty things to your shoes - buttons, sequins, gems, beads, stickers, whatever you have around. If the object is light enough you can just press it into the wet surface of the shoes and you may not need to sew it.
Bonus:
If you have extra glitter mixture you can decorate various other objects - sketchbooks, statues (my friend brought me a small Mount Rushmore statue from a recent trip that’s asking to be glitterfied), pet collars, lamp bases, canvases, cell phones, etc.
Done!
Enjoy your new shoes (and send me photos).
