BLady's Flowered Sandals

Today's post comes from BLady who has been doing her own craft projects lately. When she sent me the pictures of these shoe clips she made and attached to a pair of sandals she got last year, I wanted to go out and make a pair for myself.


When BLady, Megs and I were in Dallas shopping a couple of weeks ago, BLady kept commenting on all of the sandals with floral embellishments. She was right - there are a lot of shoes like that out there right now.

Flower shoes by Schizi on Polyvore.com

Items in this set:
Product: Naya "Atwood", $120
Product: Guess "Akera" Sandal, $60
Product: GB "Ruffle-Up" Sandal, $50
Loeffler Randall 'Brynn' Sandal - Nordstrom
Badgley Mischka 'Randi' Sandal - Nordstrom

To make these, I first cut squares from organza, five for each flower, and pinned them together. I cut the squares into circles because cutting them together made them more uniform in size.


Then, I carefully singed the edges with a lighter. This took a little practice to make sure that I didn't melt too far. I layered them just a little off center of each other and sort of alternated left/right. I stitched them together in the middle and added three crystals. Then I just added the shoe clips. I found that attaching the clips a little off to one side makes the flowers line up with the shoe better.


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If you don't have a pair of sandals hanging out in the bottom of your closet, you could get one of these pairs.

Jessica Simpson 'Vida' SandalReef 'Slingshot'

Spring flower makeover

I'm halfway through switching my closet to spring. Last night, I went through everything in my closet and drawers, pulling out things that I didn't wear all winter to determine if they should a) go directly to Goodwill or the church-wide rummage sale or b) live another season in clothing purgatory (a big rubbermaid box in my storage unit).

Today, I'll go through the rubbermaid boxes and swap out summer stored clothes for winter. Yay! Then, it's fashion show time, determining how can I put existing clothes together in new ways to update for 2010.

I've already added a few accessories to my collection to help the spring transformation.

These floral beauties came from OwlEyes Accessories over at Etsy. The orange flower bunch is a big pin made out of felt. It will liven up my denim jackets and cardigans and also add some more of my favorite-color-of-the-moment to my wardrobe (it's orange).

Hanging out on my gray Toms are blue flower shoe clips. I got the idea to use shoe clips on my Toms after Megs and I talked about getting 'mod-ing' our Toms. Now, my Toms can have multiple personalities without any lasting changes.

Time for spring wreath

When folks come to visit my apartment, I tell them to go until they see an orange rug. The rug came from Anthropologie many years ago, and I just put it there when I moved in. I always meant to get a new rug, but I've really come to love the spot of color when I come around the corner to my door. Then, at Christmas, I hung my very first wreath. That came down about mid-January and my door has been rather ordinary since then.

Until now. I finished my new wreath, which I am calling 'Time for spring'. It's made from a Styrofoam wreath form, yarn, fake flowers and pieces of time magazine. And, a lot of hot glue.
  

First, I covered the wreath form with variegated green yarn. This took quite awhile. I started on Sunday during the Oscars, and worked on it a little bit each night since then. The real trick was keeping the yarn from tangling as I wound it around the form.

I choose the two different floral stems because I liked the leaves and the colors. And, since it’s me, I needed to have something made out of magazines on it. I saw this tutorial from Dozi on another blog and printed it off a long time ago for creating paper flowers. I don’t remember which blog referenced the tutorial, but thank you!

Time Magazine is good for large blocks of text, but the paper stock is rather light. The result was more of a bud than the full flower that Dozi achieved. To get the bud to work, I glued it onto floral wire and then wrapped from there. I held on to the bottom of the wrap to try to get the top to fan out.

The buds were not enough magazine, so I simply made some paper carnations by bunching together a couple of different sized circles.
Finally, I grabbed the hot glue gun and just started sticking stuff on. I wish I could tell you that there was a process, but I would add something and then realize it needed something else.

My door is a now a lot more welcoming.


Oh, and I had an extra paper carnation, so I glued it onto a bobby pin and stuck it in my hair.