Fancy Footwork

I LOVE SHOES!!!! I buy shoes a lot but often I do not spend a great deal of money on them. A craft I have simply adored is decorating my own shoes.

You can pick up white trainers or plimsolls relatively cheaply from large clothing retailers like Primark, Peacocks, or even at your local Market. There are loads of options of how you can decorate these to make them totally original to you. Take a look on Pinterest and Youtube for inspiration, and then design your own scheme.

In the examples here I have used 2 different methods. The pink and yellow laced pumps I used acrylic paint to create the little blossoms. With a rounded brush I loaded it with paint and made delicate blobs of light pink in a circle to create the petals, I then daubed the darker pink in the same pattern towards to centre of the flower. I repeated this until I had a number of flowers that evenly coated the shoe. I let the pink paint dry, cleaned off my brush and then added the yellow spot in the middle. I soaked the laces in a red dye mix, I did this for a very short time so that they rinsed out to a light pink shade to match the detail of the blossoms. I then painted the opening of the shoe and the sides of the soul pink to match. So girly and pretty.

For the bandage-style, Flower Power Pumps, I used permanent markers for the design. I lightly drew in the outlines with pencil and then layered over this with black marker. I then filled the pattern with colourful marker pens, even adding shading with slightly darker shades.

With both of these designs I used a matt clear coat spray to seal in the colour and hopefully make them more waterproof.