Add a Little Bit of Vintage Love to Your Shoes! - A Tutorial

A Little bit of Vintage Love...

For Your Shoes!

I have heaps of left over lace bits of late that are not quite big enough for much at all really. So what to do with them all? When I saw a couple of little pairs of cheap ($2 a pair) canvas sand shoes recently I had a light bulb moment!....Bing....

So, I'll attempt to take you through a pictorial Tutorial so you can see my attempts at bringing an idea to life, some successful and some not so! This is how my light bulb moment came into being.

1. Take one pair of cheap canvas shoes. These ones were $2 on sale at Kmart

2. Grab your scrap pieces of lace . I also have used some scrapbooking card stock underneath the lace, you will see why in a minute.

3. Start spraying. I have used glimmer mist from tattered angels, but It would be a better idea to use fabric dye solution and put it into a little spray bottle. (or an empty glimmer mist bottle)

And some pink and any other colour you like. Then once you have coloured all of your lace you will have a lovely assortment of pretty coloured lace to use like this...

4. What I ended up with was a bit of a of a stencilled effect on the card stock to used for Christmas tags or a scrapbook page. Each lace cotton or nylon had a different affect. I thought I would try this on the canvas shoes! How amazing would that look! Well in my head it would look amazing anyway.

This was my favourite one!

5. So once again using the lace as a stencil I placed it on the shoe and spritzed away with the glimmer mist.

So far so good...

Away I went, spritzing some more. I had in mind that I would layer each of the laces making a different coloured layer each time. What I didn't do was let each layer dry before adding the next one. It would probably be a good idea to let it dry.  Woops!

The effect did not work out the way I thought it would.

As you can see it didn't really work out as well as the doily on the side. Oh well, into the washing machine for these little shoes and on to plan B!

PLAN B- I Still had all that pretty coloured lace, so I add some glue to the shoes. ( Glue that stick fabric and is a little bit flexible when set would work best- not the glue that I used!)

Stick on the lace then carefully trim the lace close to the top edge of the rubber

Adding the next layer...

And then the next. You might need to hold the lace in place until it sets so those little edges stay down! Overall I'm pretty happy with the end result but more importantly so is miss 4 yo! And what to do with the cut offs, well...

Make a Christmas tree of course! complete with a 'little bit of vintage" button at the top.  It is almost here you know! This lace Christmas tree idea can be used on cards, a scrapbook page or on a canvas why you could probably even glue it to card stock of the same shape to hang on your Christmas tree. Don't forget to make something  crafty with your negative prints that you created when spraying. Some ideas once again for that is Cards, wrapping paper, gift tags and scrapbook pages.  So there it is using scraps of scraps to create something a little bit vintage and a whole lots pretty. Would love to hear about what you come up with if you give this little project a go. xx R

Dying to share with you...

A RAINBOW OF COLOUR
We are now at the end of our school holidays here and boy am I going to miss not having to rush around in the morning and be out the door by 8am. I needed to have a break from the sewing so Miss 15 and I decided to have a play with the dye I have had sitting in he cupboard. I overcame the chance of a major dye disaster and bit the bullet! Methodically and carefully we dug out every single large coffee jar we had laying around the house, measured out exactly 1 litre and 1 Tbs salt in each and every single one of them.
We also thought that it would be a great idea to have a few samples of every colour in varying intensity...so over the next 4 hours this id the beautiful rainbow of sample colours we have created along with a few custom mixes, with each and every formula being recorded with a hope that we might be able to recreate it for a future Myrtle & Grace collection... I did say I HOPE!

I use syringes to measure out the dye to the exact millilitre just because the dye looked amazing in them all grouped together I though I wold take a photo of that too!

It's Not the Technique is the Colour of Your Ball!

What a funny night of bowling we had with miss 2 & 3/4 (Emily) almost beating all of us! Couldn't have been the ramp because miss 8 ( Caitlin) used that too.

Miss Caitlin was becoming increasingly upset with the idea that her little sister could possibly beat her. The more frames that were bowled the further apart the scores grew. Spare after spare and strike after strike Caitlin's displeasure grew to dispair and then disappearance from the lane all together

Do Something Creative Every Day!

After a full on week with Myrtle and Grace stuff I decided that some wind down relaxation was in order. Some special creative time for Mummy involved a trip to the Imagination Factory to complete a Bernie Dodd class which was thoroughly enjoyable. I love the page Bernie helped me create, so Emily right now with all the prettiness, frills and flowers attached. I really enjoy joining in a class to learn new techniques and styles and I couldn't have asked for a more talented teacher! Do something creative every day I say.