blinging up my shoes

I have two friends getting married next month, and am currently working on my outfit for the first wedding. (The second wedding is covered, since I'll be participating in the ceremony as a musician and will therefore be wearing a black dress I made back in the spring.) The dress, which is from scratch and will therefore not be posted on here, is coming along nicely. I was having an issue with shoes, though, since I realized that I really didn't have any that would work with either outfit. So I went out shopping yesterday in hopes of finding something that would work with both dresses and two different levels of formal (I'm playing in an evening wedding, and attending a morning wedding.) But I have a hard-to-fit shoe size, and between all of the shoes being too narrow and the current trend of 4" stiletto heels that I would surely break an ankle if I try to dance in them, I wasn't successful. So I decided that, since the friend I was running errands with needed to stop at the fabric store anyway, I'd just embellish some shoes I already have. This is still in process, but I have one shoe done, so I made a tutorial to share with you all. (Plus this will help me remember when I get to the next shoe!)

I started with these shoes--just a basic brown Mary Jane-style. They're perfectly nice shoes as is, and I didn't want to do anything permanent to them. So I decided to do shoe clips. I had to purchase most of the materials since I knew I didn't have anything on hand that would work this time, but you could easily use things you have already.

I got a pack of clip-on earrings, and after my friend and I were playing around with them, we discovered that bending the curved-in part (the part that goes against the back of the ear) out flat made for a much more comfortable fit inside the shoe. I used three of these for one shoe, but how many you would need would depend on the style.

I took a scrap of thin fleece (to help protect my shoe), and marked the curve of the edge onto it...

...and trimmed that shape out. Then I took the first earring clip and centered it on the front of the shoe, with the side of the clip that the earring would get attached to up.

I sewed this onto the fleece, making sure to go through the lip and also stitch through the bar to the back of the fleece.

Then I took a little ribbon flower and stitched through the back of that to attach it to the earring. I used pre-made ones since I'm on a time crunch, but this could be fun with homemade fabric flowers too!

I repeated this process until I had 3 flowers/earring clips on the fleece. I made sure to start stitching the earrings on while they and the fleece were clipped to the shoe, so I could get the flowers lined up really nicely with the edge.

Then I trimmed the fleece to this oddball shape so that it wouldn't show past the flowers, being very careful not to cut the stitching (which you can't really see in this picture, since it sinks into the fleece enough to make it hard to see.)

And this is my now fancier-shoe! Like I said, I still have to do the left shoe of this pair. And I also have plans to do another clip style for my black shoes, so I'll show those too when it's done. Since I had to buy the stuff, I probably didn't save much money (at least this vs. a new pair from Payless Shoes), but I'm happy to not have to try and fit another pair of shoes into my little closet! Plus I already know these shoes fit and are broken in!