I’ve been hiding a pair of old, stained white shoes in my closet for months while I waited for inspiration to strike. In the meantime I tried scrubbing them and got the worst of the stains out, but the toes were permanently yellowed. The shoes themselves are in great condition though (white shoes always look way worse earlier than other shoes). Last weekend I finally pulled out my acrylic paints and gel glue leftover from my previous forays into fabric painting and got busy…

First, I wanted to do a design on the toe so I drew a pattern that I wanted to keep white (well… as white as the toes are to start with) with the gel glue and let that dry.

Then I mixed the acrylic paints together to make a nice teal blue and blue/gray color. I watered both of these down until they were about 6 parts water to one part paint. This guaranteed that the paint wouldn’t make the shoes too stiff or saturated with pigment.

You can see the glue acting as a resist to the blue paint on the toes. After the shoes dried for two days I soaked them in hot water and took a good, stiff scrub brush to them to get the glue off. I stuffed the shoes with newspaper to help them dry faster and in a nice, foot shape. Three days later, they are ready to wear!

I’m pretty happy with the whole process but there are definitely things I would do differently next time. First, I would stuff the shoes with newspaper before applying the glue. When I tried to wash the stains off the first time I let the shoes dry in a funny, wrinkled shape. This made getting a nice, even design on the toe super difficult. I also would have used white acrylic paint to hide some of the stains as well before gluing. Fortunately, it looks like the glue actually took the worst of the stains with it when I scrubbed it off! Now I’m ready for spring with a pair of fun new shoesies…