Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Shoe Torture


Here are the results of my recent bouts of shoe torture (which is way too fun to be legal btw). I went to Famous Footwear and bought four or five pairs of shoes on clearance to play with after my last experiments. The top pair is done in ShivaPaintstiks (not sure how I'm going to heat set them, maybe in the dryer). I did them with stencil brushes. They are not symmetrical. I put ribbon yarn in as laces and added beads to the ends (they are merely decorative, not meant to be tied). That was a very fast, fun pair to do. I like the soft, easy airbrushed look.

The bottom pair I call Spring Bling. They were a semi-ugly floral print. First I pained them with Lumiere Emerald Green (big improvement already). Then I glued on dichroic cabochons. Next I glued on little sparkly gems (used E6000 for all gluing). Finally I glued on beads--leaf beads and round green Czech glass. Well, I used too much glue for the cabochons and didn't let them dry enough. So after the first test-wearing, I peeled off all the ones that weren't tightly bonded (six of them), peeled off all the glue, and re-applied with about 1/3 to 1/2 the amount of glue. Then I let them dry for three full days. Now they are stuck on there good and tight. Just goes to show you that more (glue) is not always better.

4 comments:

Ricë said...

great shoes--the lumiere turned out GREAT!

Creepy Margaret said...

Nice work. Someone from a Sacramento craft group forwarded your blog to me. How do you get people to find your blog and post comments? I just started mine. It's creepyheads.blogspot.com or you can email me at my website creepyheads.com

UpsideDownSarah said...

I just post to my groups that I have a blog update, and people look if they want to. Thanks for your comment.

Gina said...

Art on your feet! Great idea about decorating cheapo shoes--love the blue/purple ones.