Hi friends!
I’m back with another boot DIY! These were a different experience for many reasons, I’ll explain below. Let’s jump in!
As with all my other shoe DIYs, the boots I used I bought used from ThredUp.
The inspiration for these boots came from my aunt who was wearing the coolest jean jacket that she had added blue and white floral panels to when she came to visit us. I love the idea of blue and white chinoiserie or delft china style things, so I decided that was going to be these boots!
Originally I wanted to cover these in a fabric quilt sort of thing, but I quickly realized that would be a lot of work and switched over to the idea of painting them.
I did quite a lot of research because I’ve never painted flexible shoes before. The ones I was using were a type of leather. I’ve painted solid heels of shoes (like you can see here) but I wasn’t quite sure how to deal with the flexibility and the paint.
Most everything I read said to use acrylic paint slightly watered down for smoothness of coating. And the most stressed thing was to wait till the previous coat was dry before applying the next one.
So, I did that!
After taping all of the places I didn’t want paint, I applied probably about three coats of white paint as a base layer. The boots were brown before, so I really wanted to make sure they were white before I painted flowers on them.
At first I wasn’t going to do leaves or anything, just flowers. So I used a small brush and some dark blue paint to paint flowers on the boots.
However, I quickly realized that from a distance the flowers I had painted looked like stars which was not the look I was going for. So I ended up painting leaves on them which I’m very glad I did!
When they were dry I sprayed some acrylic sealer on them which was also recommended in all the posts I read. I’m not sure what I used on them was the best thing, but it’s what I had.
I wore my boots for the first time last night and did a lot of walking in them which unfortunately cracked them quite a bit. I think in my case cracking is unavoidable.
If you wanted to replicate what I did, I would recommend buying white boots and just painting the blue flowers on.
All in all, I’m happy with how they turned out!
Go paint some super cool boots!
Happy crafting!
