DIY Flowered Ballet Flats

Like I wrote in an earlier post, I’ve had flowers on the brain.  (Thus all those fabric flower patterns in that post, and myThreadbanger roundup.)  I was going to do these as a DIY tutorial for my Tuesday Threadbanger post, but then realized they weren’t really worthy of a full-fledged tutorial.  I got the idea from a lovely pair of furfur flowered ballet flats I spotted online recently.  (I do love furfur!)  To make them was almost embarrassingly easy, but here’s the how-to if you guys are interested:

You Need:
*lace ribbon, about 1.5 yds

*white silk flowers
*peachy pink silk hydrangea flower
*dusky blue tea rose/camellia
*pair of Payless American Eagle Eliza Flower Flats in heather gray

and…
*glue gun and glue sticks
*scissors

How To:
Prep Your Parts
1. Heat up the glue gun.

2. Remove the front flowers from your ballet flats – they’re secured by two lines of stitching, and some double-sided tape.  Pretty easy to remove.

3. Separate your flowers from their stems.  I chose small white flowers that were 3-layered, pulled 3 different-sized petals from the hydrangea to make a single peachy pink flower (I made 4 of these), and pulled the entire blue rose and bud off their stems, and separated them from the plastic centers and stamens.

Lay the Lace

4. Starting out the outer edge of the front of one shoe, lay a line of glue down and press the lace into it.  Fold the lace back and forth across the front, laying glue as you go.
5. After you’ve done a couple of swirly loops, cut the ribbon and glue down the end.

Add the Flowers

6. Start at the outer edge with a white flower.  Glue each layer separately down.

To make the flowers more “fluffy” I also added glue in the center and folded one side of the petals inward.

7. Add more flowers, alternating colors.

For extra-large petals (like from the rose), I folded the petals in half, quarters, and then eighths, gluing as I went.  Then I cut the bottom half-inch off, and glued the top part onto the shoe.  In a couple cases I didn’t even need to cut the bottom off; I just folded it down and made a base for the flower thus.  The next flower I placed close so you can’t see the folded bottom.

8. Pull off any gluey spiderweb glue “strings” from your project – and wear your flowers on your feet!

Happy DIY’ing!
xoxox
Carly