Quick ‘n’ Crafty: Glam Up Your Shoes!

[UPBEAT MUSIC] Hi. I’m Diana. Today, I’m going to show you how to give new life to an old, sad pair of shoes. It’s the perfect craft to make for yourself or for someone you love. I’m making one for my sister. She’s missing a shoe– this one. 

So what you’re going to need is an old pair of shoes, preferably black or something where paint will show up. So in this case, this shoe is black. It has some suede on it, which is easy to paint on because the paint will stick well to it. We’re going to tape the parts that we want to keep black, and the parts that are not taped, that’s what we’re going to paint with gold. 

The trickiest part is getting the strips of tape to how you want them. So you could buy a skinnier roll of masking tape. I wanted to challenge myself, so I bought wider masking tape. So I’m going to have to cut them into narrower strips. As you can see in the finished one, these strips are much thinner. It’s maybe like three of these. 

Take the sharp end of a scissor and the width that you want it. So I want it to be about a third. Just kind of drag the sharp edge on the tape. Now, you want to be very careful when you’re cutting. No pair of shoes is worth going to the emergency room to get a Band-Aid. 

Just pull off the piece of tape and it should come off pretty easily. It might give you a little trouble at first, but just stick with it. Now that we have it going, you see it’s like a nice narrow strip. Just be careful with tape. It always surprises me how sticky it is. 

And now that we have our tape, we’re going to take our shoe and you’re just going to– again, the lines that you don’t want to get painted on them, we’re going to cover. Tape doesn’t really like to stick to shoes. It’s kind of like an oil and water situation. So you might have to use a little more tape than you normally would just to keep things down. 

And if your shoe has a zipper, like this one does, you might even want to cover the zipper. Or, for example, I don’t want to do the heel of the shoe. I just want to do this back part. So you could cover this whole part in tape. So really, it’s whatever design you want to make. I like stripes, so I’m going to do stripes. 

OK. So as you can see, I’ve completely covered the back part of the shoe and the strips of tape. I’ve also put a little border here. That way, I don’t get any paint on the heel part. And I’ve covered the leather part. I’ve also covered the zipper of the shoe on this side. That way, I don’t get the zipper gold and then it can’t go up and down. She’d never be able to take off her shoes. 

OK. So now that the tape is down, we’re going to paint it. And this looks like really crazy, but I promise you, it’s going to come out pretty nice. So now you’re going to take your gold acrylic paint. And again, I love acrylic paint because it dries so shiny and I love shiny things. You’re going to put some in a plate. So before you paint anything, just make sure that the pieces of masking tape are really pressed down so that none of them rebel and get paint underneath. You still might, but we can fix that later. 

We’re just going to completely brush over it. I would do two or three coats of paint, depending on how bright you want the stripes to look. And this is really fun. There’s something really exciting about giving new life to something that was so weird and pitiful. 

Now let’s take a break to open up some viewer mail. This one comes from Alice Farber of the Big Apple, New York. That’s all the way from New York City, New York. It’s a long letter. “Dear Diana, I saw in one of your last episodes that you said I should always label my scissors. What else should I be labeling?” That’s an excellent question, Alice. 

Well, the thing is, there is not one thing that you should be labeling. You should be labeling everything. I can’t stress this enough. This is the perfect example– a box of tissues. It’s just the thing you want labeled, especially during cold and allergy season, and even flu season. 

Now that you’ve covered the part of the shoe that you want to be striped in gold and you’ve done a few coats, we can take the tape off. This is the most fun part of this whole project. It’s OK to do this when the paint’s a little still wet because we don’t want the tape to become a permanent part of the shoe. This is the only time that I willingly touch the bottom of a shoe. 

We’re going to take the edge and just pull it off. See how beautiful that is? Another strip. Oh my goodness. Look what we did. 

So now we have a beautiful shoe. It’s just the thing you’ll wear to impress your mother, your boss, your plumber. It’s the perfect accessory to wear with that little black dress that you’ll wear to the gala. Thanks for watching, everybody. See you later.