Repairs and Reflections

Remember those bright cartoon shoes I made?

Well, I have been wearing them (with socks! I don't care if I look weird, I'm tired of bleeding heels) and suffice to say, they don't look like that anymore.

The cartoons have ripped, the fabric has stretched, and my beautiful shoes have started to simply disintegrate. After all, this is newspaper. Even with the copious layers of mod podge, the paper isn't that strong.

Which is why I decided to repair them. I still love them, and the idea of the cartoon shoes. They just need a little TLC, that's all. So, putting my near-obsession with the Olympics on hold, I paused the TV and headed outside.

The Olympics are just amazing; I wish I had some iota of talent in the gymnastics area. Alas, even my cartwheel is a bit sketchy, not to mention the enumerable times I have crashed, tumbling to the ground as I attempted, yet again, to do a front walk-over/front hand spring.

Anyway! Back to the shoes; I had a bit more luck with them than with my ill-fated love affair with tumbling.

 I grabbed the Sunday Comics and set about pasting on a new layer of comics. The backs of the shoes were remarkable unscathed, I just brushed another layer of mod podge of them. The top and front of the shoes were where the issues were. I simply covered the entire front with new cartoons, adhering them with mod podge. 

As I had recovered the top, I also had to apply a new 'Cartoon' header, as I really like how that tied the whole shoe together.

My workspace! Not pictured is my iPhone, blaring music. I'm so exited for the new model of the iPhone to come out! Mostly because I'm a geek when it comes to technology (and almost anything else).

Et, volia! My shoes, 2.0. I don't know how long they'll last, but I'm going to ere on the side of caution, and apply many more layers of mod podge.

I often get distracted by reflections. Any sort will catch my eye, from imperfect shadows, to sunglasses impersonating mirrors. I was watching Friends when the bottle I was drinking from caught my eye.

I loved the light that filtered through the end, bouncing off the water.

 

This was actually a reflection from my sunglasses. I love how the picture of the house is overlaid with the texture and distortion from the lenses. 

 Which way is the shadow facing? You could either be looking into it, or looking at the bottom. ;)

These two pictures are just shadows from my plastic cut. I loved, however, just how crisp they were. They were just shadows, but they really can stand on their own, with all the detail they have.

Well, I'm back to watching the Olympics! As always, thanks for reading :)

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!

The One with the Shoes

Alternatively titled, Paris Rose. :)

Why? You'll see!

So, continuing on my crafting streak, I stumbled upon a cool tutorial that gave new life to old shoes.

I have an old pair of white shoes that I bought for Shirttails, a dance competition at my college.



After the competition, I threw them into the back of my closet and forgot about them. In the back of my mind I planned to paint them some time, like some of the amazing shoes I had seen on Deviant Art.

In this mental planning my complete lack of painting skills would magically turn into the perfect ability to decorate my shoes in a variety of Zelda symbols.

When I got back home for summer break, my tired old shoes just lay on my floor. The reality of my inability to draw a straight line broke any ideas of painting the shoes.

That's when I stumbled upon the coolest tutorial involving a pair of shoes, an old book, and copious amounts of mod podge. I didn't even know what mod podge was a week ago but since my jump into the deep end of crafting, I'm a little better versed in the materials. Mod podge is this type of glue substance. Armed with a 40% off coupon I found online I headed to Hobby Lobby and bought a small container of mod podge for around three dollars.



The cast of characters! Armed with these simple tools and my beat up shoes, I turned my iPhone on full volume and got started.



It was a little intimidating at first-- I had no clue what I was doing. I just knew I needed to paste the paper onto the shoe. It turned out as easy as it sounds. I slapped some mod podge down on the shoe, put the strip of paper on it and then pasted more mod podge over it. I had brought some scissors out to help cut the pages of the book but soon decided that I liked the rougher look of tearing the paper by hand.



It was fairly easy and fun work. It was also an awarding art form. There was no right or wrong way, it looked good no matter what you did.

I got lucky and one of the books in the Reader's Digest had 'Paris' in the title.



For the other shoe I used 'Rose'. It would've been cool to have French words on my shoes but the book I was cutting up was in English and I couldn't bare to cut even a page out of my old French novels, even if I still can't read them.



And now, after some time, effort, music, and an ungodly amount of mod podge, the finished shoes!





I'm so happy with how they turned out! I can't believe a craft of mine turned out this well. ;) I plan to give them a couple more coats of mod podge and wear them out in public. And then at every opportunity draw attention them because I'm just that proud of them :D I forgotten how much I paid for the white shoes, but it was less than ten dollars. The book was found in the back of some closet (free!) and the entire thing of mod podge (of which I used 1/20th?) was three dollars. Overall, a cheap way to make unique shoes!