Witchy Shoes

This would have been a great post about 3 weeks ago...But better late then never! Getting a jump start for next year, I guess...This was a rare case where I actually took some pictures during the process of a project, and not just the final product (although I think I took about a thousand pics of the final shoes). These were inspired by some incredible altered shoes I saw via Pinterest, from this amazing blog. The process of adding the curled toe was completely copied from her method. Check out her beautiful work!! Anyways, the shoes were plain black low heel (the plan was to wear them to work for the kiddos!) Payless shoes that cost 15 dollars. Those of you who have normal sized feet can probably find even cheaper ones at cheaper stores :) those of us who have feet like the Jolly Green Giant have to take what we can get. The toe was shaped with a blob of tin foil (nice precise measurement, no?) and covered with masking tape. The masking tape continued onto the shoe to attempt to make it blend a little better. Then I tried to fill in the nooks and crannies a little by coating it with gel medium. This is definitely optional, and there are certainly other things like gesso that would be good to use. I happened to have the gel medium on hand. This is what it looked like at that point:




Obviously it isn't very smooth or perfectly formed...I was planning to cover it with paint and glitter, and I was hoping the glitter would sort of fill in the bumps a little more. So next I painted the tip and the sides with plain old acrylic craft paint.

From there, the fun really begins! The tricky part was adding the embossed spiderwebs on the side. They are heat embossed, with opaque white embossing powder. It is a little fussy, because you can't really get a good flat surface to press the stamp into. But that ended up being important, because my fiancee commented that without the spiderweb, it would have looked like a mardi gras shoe lol. I glittered the tip with matching bright green glitter, and I added rhinestones with the trusty E600 glue. The big buckle things on the toes were on clearance at Jo-Ann for 1.50 each, and they were stuck on with hot glue. And of course, some cheapo feathers everywhere!

 

The last touch was my halloween tutu :) Needless to say, it was a big hit with both the kiddos and teachers at work!