DIY SHOES! Ugly Flats to Super Cute Flats!

To be honest, it never really occured to me that I could DIY shoes, or at least re-vamp them, aside from wrapping spike belts and shit around my boots until a few years back when I found Violet's blog via stumbleupon and saw all her amazing tutorials.  Since then, I've been toying more and more with shoes, my glitter bottom heels being my first official project.

I'd say its high time for project 2, no?  This one came out so well that I'll be scouring thrift stores from now on for ugly shoes with potential instead of only looking for ones that are already cute.

I started with a pair of butt-ugly American Eagle flats I picked up at a thrift store for a dollar.

Enter, Tulip Soft Fabric Paint.  This tube was about 4 or 5 bucks at Wal-mart and we've done two pairs of shoes with it and still have more left over...One of those pair of shoes was a huge pair belonging to the Wookie and he needed two coats on his, so this stuff goes quite a way.

I wiped down the shoes to knock any excess dirt or anything off of them so the paint would stay nicely and put one coat on, being sure to take it on the inside piping a little so you can't see any brown when they are on.

I didn't expect the polka dots to show through, but they did, but its interesting because they aren't just all in-your-face polka-dotty now, in face, it almost looks like black sequins as they showed up shiny and the rest is matte.

Next, while the paint was drying, I grabbed a necklace to dissect.  This necklace was gorgeous, but I had to spend ten minutes (literally) untangling it every time I wanted to wear it only to have it re-tangled and pulling out the hair at the nape of my neck 5 minutes later, so I decided to re-purpose it for a project instead of staring at it in my jewelry box every few weeks thinking "oh well".

I cut off the drape-y part and laid it out and chose the sections of chain I wanted to use.  Two were a bit too delicate for shoes and the shot bead necklace was too big of a pain to work with, so I ended up with these three:

I simply cut the chains in half of the original lengths then attached them all at the ends with jump rings.

No idea why the bottom is fucked up, it wasn't like that before I uploaded.

Then, I picked out 4 pyramid studs, which is lucky because I only had 5 to my name...Otherwise, these would have been studded flats.  Seriously, who the hell has FIVE pyramid studs?!  I need a craft shopping spree so bad.

I put the pyramid studs on the sides of the curve of the shoe with one of the prongs going through the jump ring that's holding the chains.

Then I pushed the little teeth through the fabric and pushed them down with scissors.  I have an actual tool for that somewhere around here, but sadly enough, the scissors work better.

Then, I took some dark thread and stitched the top chain into place along the piping just because I could see that thing flipping, getting caught in with my foot, and me nerd-raging on it.  The bottom two don't really move enough to bug me, though.

Seems this picture fucked up,  too.  I tried.

Done!

...And from the side so you can see the studs.  And the imprint of the sofa fabric on my foot.

<3
Wookie Wifey