DIY Shoe-gasm

So, I love shoes.  I mean, I really love shoes!  I currently have between 65 and 75 pair of shoes.  And not a single one is the same as any other.  Sure, I have a lot of black shoes, but they're not all just straight black shoes;  I have a pair that is black and white checkered, a black a white houndstooth pair, 4-inch black shoes with bling (a wedding present from my husband - he knows how to please a woman!), and so on.  Again, no two pair of shoes looks the same.  That being said, I love each and every one of my shoes (I probably have an unnatural affinity for shoes that borders on unhealthy...but no one's perfect, right?).  So, with my love of shoes, you can imagine how upset I was years ago in college when I was dog-sitting for my mom.  I had just bought these shoes and worn them once and they were quickly becoming one of my absolute favorite pair!

So,  I went to class and everything was great.  I got home and this is what the dog-shaped spawn of satan left for me:

I was so upset I nearly cried.  I didn't know what to do.  But I knew I wasn't throwing out an otherwise good pair of shoes.  I decided that at least I could find someone to put some new fabric on them or something one day...so I held on to them.  Thank everything holy that I did!  (I'm gonna go ahead and put Pinterest into that category, since without Pinterest and the three hours I spent browsing one night, I wouldn't have come across this pin that inspired me to do something similar with my own shoes.)  Thus, the glueing began...only after about 12 hours of sorting through the giant bucket o' bling from the craft store.  Then the fun began.  After only about 30 minutes, this is how far I had come (I started on the non-satan-spawn-destroyed shoe, to make sure the modpodge would hold...):

 

So far so good.  So I took another 45 minutes and worked my way up to the fabric:

Finally after a total of almost two hours I finished one shoe!

Now came the hard part -- I had to work on the almost destroyed shoe.  To start, I had to get all the extra strings cut off the fabric and smooth out the heel.

It only took about 2 minutes to cut all the strings off, but it took about an hour to smooth out the heel with a nail file (seeing as how I still live in an apartment, there's really no reason for me to own any sandpaper at this point in my life...or so I thought.  After that hour, I wanted to go and buy a box of every type of sandpaper there is for whenever I could possibly need it...)

There was still some size difference between the top where there was a little bit of prettiness left on the heel and the bottom where there was nothing but sadness and despair, so, to even these two zones of the heel out, I applied a very thick layer of modpodge and let it sit overnight to dry:

This is what it looked like in the morning after the glue dried (I was so excited to see that it dries clear so that once I got all the bling on my shoes I could apply a layer on top to make sure all the bling stays where it's supposed to):

And after applying all the bling onto the second shoe (which took longer than the first since I had to go back and try to place all the different sized bling in the exact same position so they'd look the same), this is the final finished product before the final coat of modpodge (which is going to dry clear - yay!) so enjoy my first DIY shoe fix!