First off, these were a bitch to make! They took me about five months to complete (not working on them everyday... I'm a college kid).

I used embroidery fabric (whatever it's called) because it was stiff and I was going to do some kind of embroidery on it anyway. I cut out the feather shapes with scissors. I painted them gold with Tulip fabric paint. I used gold and silvery-gold embroidery floss to make them look more like feathers. That took the longest! I even took some with me to work on them when I went out to lunch with my mom and a couple of our friends. Then I sewed each of the feathers to the shoes and painted the white parts on the shoes gold.

I may sew the feather ends down so they don't end up getting caught on stuff.

Anyway, here you go:

My sister wanted me to paint a pair of shoes for her that had turtles in a pond scene on them. She bought a pair of white slip-ons and I worked on them over the course of a month. I gave them back to her a week ago and she's been wearing them ever since.
Here are some (ha) pictures of them. I'll start at the beginning and explain what you're seeing.

I just put this one here so you wouldn't just see a white shoe as the thumbnail.


This just shows how I taped up the parts I didn't want to paint.


This was the original color of the shoes. My sister wanted them to be blue-green, so that's how this looks. The little green squiggles are sea(or pond) weed in its beginning stages of being drawn on (I used fabric markers for that).


This is what the color and weeds ended up looking like.


This is the mid-point. Notice the turtle on the lily pad looks like it's on top of the water.


This is the final product. The turtle now looks like it's still partially underwater and struggling to climb onto the lily pad.


This is a close-up of the cattails I painted on the sides. I just did the outsides of the shoes and left the insides blue to make it look like the whole pond is shown.


Close-up of the original turtle.


Close-up of the finished turtle.


Thanks for looking and commenting!

I spent a week and a half with my sister, bro-in-law, and adorable nephew last week. I live in Michigan and they live in Ohio so we don't get to see each other as often as we'd like.
On the night before I was supposed to go back home, my sister and I decided to paint a couple shirts using fabric paint and some freezer paper. I'm really interested in aliens and decided to do a stereotypical alien face and my sister did a really awesome bonsai inspired tree. She cut out her tree shape and ironed it on and sponged the paint on around it. It's so awesome! Anyway, here they are:

This is mine. I decided to put an alien face on my shirt, but although the face and eye shapes are pretty generic, I decided to paint the eyes blue with silver in them. You can't really see the silver in the picture but you can in real life.


This is my sister's. The picture doesn't show the different colors in the image. There are different blues and greens, but you can't really see it here.


I have a picture of the two of us wearing our shirts, but I don't know if my sister would want me to put her picture up on here or not, so I'll put it up later if she wants me to.

My friend was severely injured from falling 50 feet on a sailboat. She'll be bedridden for a long time and I wanted to cheer her up a little. Since she loves sailboats (she used to work on one for the Michigan Maritime Museum), I wanted to buy a miniature one for her. But, I don't just want to give her the boat, I want to personalize it. She obviously can't make it to the local Renaissance festival next month but since she's friends with some of the stage acts, I wanted to get them to sign a paper or write a short note to her that I could transfer onto the sails of the mini-boat. I don't want to carry the boat around all day, so obviously they can't sign the sails directly. Is there a way to either get the paper to stick to the sails and not look like paper stuck on the canvas or to transfer the writing onto the sails?

Thanks for any suggestions!

I'm not actually a cow person, I like owls (as you should be able to tell by my username). I am a firm believer in UFOs and aliens, however. I mean, I don't just believe, I know they exist.

Moooving on... I had this idea for a pair of shoes a while ago and I was going to take a dark blue pair of shoes and use a bleach pen on them to hopefully make it look like stars. I let the bleach stay on the shoes for about half an hour and nothing happened. So, I was disappointed but not discouraged. I painted these last weekend and I'd originally planned on having the UFO beaming the cow up on one shoe and then painting an alien dude on the second shoe with his hand in that Vulcan hand position, you know, when they say, "Live long and prosper." Then I was thinking it wouldn't go together very well so I just painted a hill with cows looking up at the disappearing UFO. I painted these because I find it really funny that aliens are always depicted as the bad guys stealing our cows.

On to the pictures:


Sorry for the blurriness of the picture. I was using my flash this time so it shouldn't be blurry. Anyway, this shows the UFO on the other shoe as it's leaving.

My sister made this messenger bag for my birthday. She's new to sewing (she started in August of this year) and my birthday was in September. She made the bag out of an old skort and a pair of corduroy pants. I think it's so awesome and I love it so much, especially knowing that she made it for me. I've been sewing for about a year and I doubt that I'd be able to create something like this. Anyway, I took some pictures of the purse because I think it's awesome.

This is the front of the bag and the flap is made from a pair of corduroy pants. The strap is really cool because she sewed in a bunch of button holes and buttons so I can make it as short or as long as I want it to be.

This is the front without the flap to show the skort part of it with its drawstring to keep it closed.

She sewed the pocket onto the back.

This shows the inner lining and an inner pocket... plus the stuff that I had in my purse.

I made this last month and it didn't take too long. The part that took the longest was measuring and cutting it out from the shower curtain.

I bought the shower curtain from a Salvation Army. I'm not very into flowery things but I thought it would be cool anyway, especially for a first clothing reconstruction. The curtain originally had this flap on the top that came down over the curtain and that made it so much easier to make! All I had to do was cut the flap off from the rest of it, sew the sides together, cut a flap for the button hole part to overlap the buttons, and that was about it. The curtain has button holes all along the top of it for some reason so I didn't have to bother sewing them in.

I didn't take pictures of the original shower curtain, but I'm sure you've seen some like this already.



This is a button and a dart. Apparently I need to learn how to focus my camera.

This is another dart. If you look closely you can see a pre-existing button hole.

This is blurry because my mom was taking the picture and she isn't very technologically advanced, at least not with digital cameras. She must be where I get my inability to focus my camera.


Yes, I also made the cuff I'm wearing on my wrist. It was originally a neck-tie. They're so easy and fun to make!

One thing that I don't like about this skirt is that when I'm wearing tights (as in the picture) with it, the skirt tends to ride up when my purse is resting on my leg while I'm walking in the halls at school (I only carry messenger-style purses). I don't know if putting in some kind of lining would help, like a satin-y lining or something. Do you guys think it would help?

Comments are welcome!

As you can tell by my user name I am obsessed with owls.

My mom bought me some black ugly-granny shoes from Wal-Mart for $5. I'd originally wanted white because I figured they'd be easier to paint on, but I couldn't find my size (7.5) and settled for black ones because they came in my size. Then we went to Michael's and I bought fabric paint and brushes for about $20 (I bought 4 colors for this project and 3 for my next one). I tried marking on the
shoes with a pencil to see if the graphite would be visible on the black, but obviously that didn't work. Fortunately, my mom made some buntings for my nephew and had a white fabric marking pencil that she didn't use on her sewing project so I borrowed that. Then I drew an owl on each shoe to make sure that they were as much like each other as possible when I painted them. Then I spent about two hours painting one shoe and had to stop for a few days because I was too busy to work on the second one. Last night I finished the second one and decided to put a little more paint on the first one since my mom had picked up some black fabric paint for me. Since the first shoe had already dried it was easier to paint on than the second one and looks better and cleaner than the second. Anyway, here's the result.

The one on the right was the first one I painted. It was able to dry before I put more paint on it, so it looks better than the one on the left.


This picture shows the drawing with the fabric marking pencil that I used before I painted.


These are just different views of the shoes, in case you don't want to bother with the links.






I thought I'd jump on the bandwagon and have my foot in a picture (apparently it is common to be barefoot while crafting and then to accidentally take a picture of your project with your foot in the picture. I don't walk around barefoot so this will have to do).


This picture from my calendar was my inspiration.


I don't know if I'm done with these shoes yet. I know black and brown aren't supposed to go together but these are owls and owls fly at night, so black is more appropriate than white. I was thinking of painting stars on the sides of the shoes to make the black and brown color combination less weird.

I now have a pair of white shoes of the same kind that I'm going to paint on next.