My girls love to wear Toms shoes! And their love of Toms and the great mantra the company shares with the rest of the world made me love Toms too! I have four pair now. My favorite pair is my sparkly red ones. This Kansas-born-and-raised-girl (until the middle of my 8th grade year) simply had to have them! They remind me of Dorothy shoes and since the high school where I teach and where Hannah plays basketball is red and grey, they were simply meant to be! And I may or may not occasionally, when my high school students are being a bit rude or rowdy, click my heels together and think to myself, "There's no place like home!" :-)
The red sparkly ones are my favorite, but I also have a pair that I thought I liked when I first bought them but then realized they just needed something. With the blessed growth of my photography business and my responsibilities at home and at school, I don't have a lot of time to get my craft on.
But, with the upcoming Baylor game, I had my inspiration and a little extra time (extra meaning, I was finishing these babies up at 3:30 in the morning, right before we caught our 9:30 flight.
This is what I started with:
I carefully stuffed each shoe with newspaper and taped off the parts that I didn't want to paint with blue painters tape:
This is what I used to glitter-fy my Toms:
I poured the Mod Podge into a plastic bowl (which makes clean up easier) and added lots of gold glitter. Can you have too much glitter?!
And then I started painting the glitter and glue mixture all over my shoes. I would suggest starting with a thin coat, letting it dry for about 30 minutes, and then adding another coat.
It doesn't look awesome at this point, but it will. Be patient! (I hear you giggling Mom! I'm not a fan of the "P" word.)
To speed things up a bit, I decided to paint the glitter/glue mixture on and then microwave each shoe for 30 seconds. I don't recommend this step. It doesn't smell lovely and it makes the glue run.
Finally, after three coats, I decided to peel off the tape to reveal the design. Looking good. At around midnight, I decided it would be super awesome to tape off the gold and add green glitter to the plain part of the shoes. Green and Gold, Sic 'em Baylor Bears!
Decisions at midnight when you are flying to Arizona in 9 and a half hours wasn't the best choice. It looked ugly (now I'm singing that silly song in my head, U-G-L-Y, you ain't got no alibi, you ugly, hey, hey, you ugly) Please, excuse me if I don't have the correct words to that song, as my family, I tend to make up my own all of the time.
This is totally off topic, but do you remember that song called, "Sad Eyes?" If you are a child of the 70's or late 60's you do. I would sing, "Satellite, turn the other way..." I was convinced those were the words! Just yesterday, our family was talking about the movie Pitch Perfect and that song, "No Diggity....or something like that" came on. I thought it was, "No Dignity!" At least I'm consistent!
Anyway, back to the shoes, after the ugly green glitter part dried and I carefully put them on my feet to see what they looked like, I decided to cover them up with more gold!
And this is where I should have a final picture, but I don't. The all gold shoes were pretty cool...a bit ghetto, but cool. I finished the shoes with a clear coat of spray sealer, quickly put them outside to dry for the next 4 hours, and finally went to bed.
Four hours later, the shoes were frozen solid! I packed them anyway in individual zip lock bags and off we went. When we arrived at our hotel in Arizona, our suitcase had a lovely varnish kind of smell. My shoes? Somehow they dried perfectly, they didn't crack, and I proudly wore them to the Baylor Pep Rally the night before the Fiesta Bowl. Whew!!!
And then Baylor lost the bowl game, end of story! Maybe they needed a little gold glitter on their shoes!