Our Accessories Category

I absolutely love painted shoes. You can find them all over the internet and they are just amazing. So on a recent business trip, I decided to fill some of my boring hotel time with a craft project. I went to Walmart and bought a pair of $10 heels on clearance, some sand paper, paint, and a $2 set of paint brushes. I spent a grand total of $20 on this project (minus the clear spray I used to seal it).

The $10 Shoes

Everything I used, except the gloss spray

So here’s what I did:

1. Sand the shoe down. The paint won’t adhere to the shinny surface, so you need to get all that off. I also hear using acetone helps, but I didn’t have any.

2. Tape off the bottom of the shoe

3. Paint your base coat, I used solid white and needed 2 coats.

4. Once your base coat is dry, draw on your design lightly with pencil.

5. Finish painting

6. Seal with 3 coats of shinny clear gloss spray paint.

Gorgeous!

So after Thanksgiving my middle sister (Angela) and I decided to have craft day. I taught her how to make the 45-minute hat while I made hats for my three beautiful nieces. Unfortunately, the measurements I got offline for head sizes were way off, and none of the hats fit. Not to leave my nieces’ heads cold, I made up a new hat pattern using a hooded sweatshirt. This hat is just as easy as the 45-minute hat, and maybe even faster.

As a side note, do you know how much fabric is in hooded sweatshirts??!! It’s incredible! I made six hats out of 1 hoodie. How awesome is that?

For this tutorial, I made 4 of the same hat in 3 sizes:

-Adult

-2 year old

-9 month old

This is a gender neutral hat (with out the flower of course). You can make it plain, add flowers or skulls or whatever. Make it your own.

I’ll go through using the adult sizes. The adjustments for different sizes will be at the end.

1. Disassemble your hoodie. To get the most use out of it, cut all the seams off including the waist band. Use a seam ripper to get the front pocket off. This gives you a lot more fabric to work with.
2. Cut 2 rectangles 10” x 12”. The short axis should be up-and-down with the grain of the sweatshirt. So basically the long end is at the top of the hoodie
3. Leaving a 3” straight segment on either side, cut the rectangle into an arched shape
   1. Here is where you can add embellishments. I added a hot pink flower using some jersey fabric from a T-Shirt.
   2. Cut Circles (I used the bottom of a votive candle holder to measure)

   

   1. Starting with the outer ring, sew in place. For adult hats, 3 rings of petals look best. The smaller the hat: the fewer rings you need.

   
   
   

   1. You might want to had sew one or to stitches in the upper petals so they don’t flop down.
4. With right-sides together sew along the arch, but not the straight segments
5. Turn right-side out, pull the seam through and sew the straight segment (wrong sides together)

1. Top stitch seam, the whole length
2. Roll bottom edge, sew

1. Flip up 2.5”, sew the side seams in place. Do not sew all the way around, it makes the hat less stretchy

1. Turn hat inside out, flatten along the front to back axis
2. Sew small arch across top of hat

DONE!

I love this hat, I really do. It was so incredibly simple, there are endless possibilities.

Adult: 10″x12″

2 year old:9″x11″

9 Month old: 8″x10″

OK, Let me start off  by apologizing for the pictures of myself. I took these last Wednesday right when I got home from work. Yes, this is exactly what I wore to work that day. I was a little tired, little frazzled, but at least the clothes were cute

Anyways, on with the tutorial!

What you’ll need:

-Ribbon

-3/4″ or 1″ wide elastic

-3 suspender clips

-Fake leather or other sturdy fabric

1. Measure from your waist band (of the pants you’ll wear these with) over your back and down to about where your bra clasp is. If you don’t have a body double, have a friend help. You don’t want to be bending and such when taking the measurements.

Add 2″ to that measurement. That’s your shoulder strap length.

2. Measure from where your bra clasp is to your waist band in the back.

Add 1″. That’s your back strap measurement

3. Cut 2 pieces of elastic shoulder strap length and 1 piece back strap length.

4. Cut 2 pieces of ribbon twice the length of your shoulder strap measurement.  Use a match to lightly melt the ends so the ribbon won’t fray

5. To sew the ribbon to the shoulder strap elastic, first match up one end of the ribbon with the end of the elastic, stitch in place

-As you sew down the length of the elastic you are going to want to stretch it. Use two hands for this; one before the needle and one after. This way you can control the speed and you won’t put extra tension on the needle

6. At one end of each of the shoulder straps, secure the suspender clip as shown:

7. Cut 2 pieces of fake leather. Make the bottom wide enough for one width of elastic and the top wide enough for at least 2.

8. Sew leather together one 3 sides, sewing in the back strap on the bottom edge.

9. Turn right-side out

10. Fold in top edge, tuck in both shoulder strap pieces, sew across top edge to secure.

11. Measure one last time (just to be sure) before you secure your last suspender clip on your back strap

All done!

So fancy and sassy!

Ok, for starters..I finally got my laptop back!! Hooray. It needed a new mother board and hard drive. Thank goodness for the extended warranty.

Anyways. So I figured out how to make this hat when Heather and I were making Renaissance Fair costumes. We needed a floppy hat, and thus the circle hat was born. I tweeked the pattern so it could be worn for day-to-day. There are tons of variations you can do. Just have fun!

P.S. You can totally get this down in 30 minutes if you are speedy and don’t really care about being perfect. Anyone else thinking Christmas gifts?

1. Measure your head where you want the hat to rest. My measurement was 22″

2. Cut your banding fabric 4″ by whatever you head measurement +1″  (4″x23″)

3. Sew the ends of your band together with 1/2″ seam

4. Figure out your circle radius:

-For a less floppy hat:      Band measurement divided by 3.14  and 1″ to that number

-For more floppy:              Band measurement divided by 6.14 then multiply by 2,3,or 4 and so on    and 1″ to that number

5. Cut circle of above radius (measurement from center of circle to edge). I used an 8″ radius

6. For this part you can either pleat or gather:

Pleat your circle pinning as you go until the opening matches the measurement of your band

7. Pin you band to the circle portion of the hat, right sides together.   For some reason I only took pictures of the checkered hat up to this point, the rest is a red hat. But it’s the same thing!

8. Sew at 1/2″ seam allowance

9. Fold the edge of the band to meet the opposite edge

10. Fold again so your first fold meets the seam

11. Pin in place and sew

All done!!!

Add flowers, change the fabric. There are tons of options. Here are three that I’ve made