Aimee Steinberger

I’ve been going through some UFOs (Unfinished Projects) and decided to tackle these DIY glitter shoes!

I’ll show you some work in progress photos and details on how I did it.

I have been searching for a sparkly pair of comfortable cute flats for at least a year now. I must have bought at least three pairs that ended up not working. They’d cut into the back of my heel or just not fit right.

At last year’s Costume College, I saw Sassy Feet’s Glitter It booth in the dealers room and was impressed with how durable their DIY glitter shoes looked so I decided to try it. The Glitter It glaze is supposed to work better than the typical glue that most people use to add glitter to their shoes. It’s doesn’t crack or shed glitter. One 2 oz. bottle of Glitter It glaze will cover at least two pairs of shoes. No need to use sealant. I’m not affiliated with them in any way, I just enjoyed using their product.

My plan was to take these unassuming but extremely comfortable Target Merona flats and make them sparkle like fairy shoes.  These shoes come in my size (Women’s US11) and are under $18. They are more comfortable than a bunch of other shoes I tried at $50!

A lot of fashion magazines and blogs lately say that metallics are the new neutrals,… so silvery iridescent DIY glitter shoes can’t be that outlandish for everyday wear, can they?

Using Glitter It is pretty straight forward.  Here’s my base comfort flats and my supplies.

Painting the Shoes

After cleaning my base shoes with alcohol, I painted them with 2 coats of Jacquard Lumiere 568 Pearlescent White Metallic Acrylic Paint.  I made sure to dab the paint into the stitching and crevices. Painting a shoe like this with folded details is more time intensive than doing a less detailed shoe. Make sure to try and push paint into the crevices, seams and stitching using a stippling type brush movement. Take a cue from me and don’t use a cheapy cheap paintbrush. I ended up having to remove a bunch of shedding paintbrush hairs while I was working. Another tip, you might want to mask off the soles of your shoes (with painters tape or masking tape). I didn’t bother to do it, but I think you’d get cleaner results that way.

After 2-3 coats, I could still see the brown of the undershoe a bit, but I was pretty sure that it wouldn’t show when the shoe was finally covered in glitter. I was right.

Glittering the Shoes

I added the loose iridescent glitter (color “Crushed Crystal”) to the Glitter It glaze and did about 3 coats of Glitter It to my now silver shoes! With both the Lumiere painting and the Glitter It painting, I’d just do a coat, go about my day doing other things and come back and do another coat, and so on. It’s a bit time intensive to do a pair of shoes this way but I was happy with the results, and it’s worth the time to have a comfortable pair of flats in exactly the shade of glitter I wanted.

Here’s my finished DIY glitter shoes!

USING DIFFERENT GLITTER

I wanted to use up the remainder of my “Crushed Crystal” glitter already mixed up with the Glitter It glaze, so I decided to experiment with adding larger different colored glitter in with the already glitter filled glaze. I added one full small bottle of Martha Stewart iridescent teal star glitter in and then followed the same steps previously. The larger glitter is a bit harder to apply than the tiny crushed glitter provided originally, but it’s still a fun look. Make sure you don’t get any of the star glitter around the edge of the shoe where it might irritate the skin of your foot. Also while you are applying it, try not to get big clumps of star glitter in one spot during one coat.

This is a separate pair of shoes, so I have one silvery iridescent pair and one silvery teal star pair.

Think if you started with a different paint base, like teal, or metallic black how you could get different looks depending on the color of glitter and the color of the under paint!

The star pair (below) reminds me of Sanrio Twin Stars!