Fun With Cartoons

Remember those two dollar shoes I bought at a consignment shop recently?

Well yesterday I decided to put them to good use. I had been thinking of covering shoes with cartoons for a while, I had just been waiting to get the right materials.

Totally random, but check out my new water bottle! Pretty nifty-- it completely collapses when it doesn't have anything in it.

Okay! Back to the shoes. It was just like the other shoes I made. I used my trusty bottle of mod podge, and  equipped with a couple pages of cartoons from the Sunday newspaper I headed outside.

The cast of characters! The only thing that worried me was the top of the shoes-- I wasn't sure how the paper would adhere to the rippled fabric. Still, I figured it was worth a try. After all, all I had to lose was a two dollar pair of shoes that I didn't really need anyway. This is why I love doing crafty things with cheap stuff. If it doesn't work out, I don't lose much ;) On a side note, I recently stumbled upon a Zelda-inspired shirt design I came up with last semester. I have an old grey shirt in the back of my closet and a couple sheets of freezer paper left...stay tuned to see what happens!

I'm almost out of mod podge, but I had enough to create my shoes. I didn't really have a plan, except to cut and paste to my heart's content.

As I cut out the Peanuts cartoon strip, I realized that they were about the height of my shoes. This meant that I could cover my shoes in almost a legible strip of cartoons. With my book shoes, I just pasted the passages on at random, covering some, angling over others. For these shoes, I liked how cohesive the squares became as I pasted them onto the shoes.

For the tops of my other shoes, I used large, title words. The header for my Sunday comics has this beautiful 'Sunday Comics' graphic. As though to enforce the implied theme, I cut out the 'comic' part to paste onto the top of the shoe.

After the first coat of mod podge was done I stuck the shoes out in the over-100-degrees sunlight. They dried in like thirty seconds; it was wonderful.

A couple more coats of mod podge later, and I was done! 

The shoes are just so colorful! I love the way they turned out.

And they are actually comfortable, unlike my other shoes, and won't give me blisters. ;) I may have to add more layers of mod podge to them. The newspaper is really thin and I'm worried that it'll just disintegrate.

Et, volia! My cartoon shoes. While I'm not a fan of modern cartoons, like on Disney, I'm a sucker for the good ole Tom and Jerry, and newspaper cartoons. :)

As always, thanks for reading!