House Shoes: A DIY

OK, beloved readers, you can stop holding your breath. The moment you've all been waiting for has arrived—the moment when I reveal the end result of my House Shoes project! In case you missed it, my previous post explains (in agonizing detail) just how I came to need a pair of house shoes; today's post will tell you how I made them better!

As you've already ascertained, I started with a pair of pistachio green Keds. No amount of washing was going to remove the greyish hue from the cotton fabric, and no amount of solvent was going to lift the rust-red paint spot from the one shoe's toe. Trust me; I tried. The only solution was to cover the ugly up!

While my favorite shoe-renovation strategy lately has been to cover the old material with a new layer of fabric, that wasn't going to work for these unstructured but highly textured tennis shoes. I decided I would paint the shoes in a two-tone gradient.

My watercolor wash technique seemed to work pretty well when I did it on the pink ballet flats (they are one of my few refashions that have remained in active usage beyond a year!), so I decided to try it again with these shoes.

I started by soaking the shoes in water to facilitate paint spread.

I stuffed the toes with plastic bags (which wouldn't absorb any of the water) to help them hold their shape while I worked.

Then I mixed some cheap sky blue craft paint with water in about a 1:4 ratio. The paint was already pretty thin, but I wanted it downright liquid!

I brushed the paint onto the shoes in a crescent shape across the toes.

To blend it better with the unpainted fabric, I painted plain water in a circular motion over the parts where the blue was still too intense.

I wasn't sure if I wanted to decorate anything other than the toes, but I accidentally swiped some paint onto the back of one shoe, so the decision was made for me!

To cover up my mistake, I used the same technique on the back of the shoe, starting with a narrow strip of blue at the top of the heel, and widening out towards the bottom. (Photo shows heels after they had dried!)

All that was left was to wait. To speed up the drying process, I set the shoes in front of the heat vent in my wall.

I left the shoes to dry overnight, and when I came for them in the morning, they were completely dry. Unfortunately, some of the color had bled in an unwanted direction, so I didn't have quite the neat ombré crescent I'd been hoping for, but house shoes are house shoes! They don't have to be perfect.

I was itching for a little somethin' extra, so I decided to dye the laces blue as well. I mixed up a little bit more paint into my water mixture, then soaked the laces in it for a few minutes.

I laid the laces out to dry on a plastic bag. When they were fully dry, I soaked them in the paint one more time.

After a second drying session, I used a pipette to touch up the parts that hadn't absorbed as much paint, to create a more even coloration.

The finished product! 

While this simple little dye job didn't cover up all the flaws in the shoes, it certainly distracts from them. I'm a lot happier to wear them now than I was when they were dingy and dirt-stained.

They even (kind of!) matched my work-from home outfit on Friday. Teleworking fashion is a whole category of outfits that I'm interested to explore, but that's another post for another time. At least I now have a decent pair of work-from-house shoes to get me started!