My Shoe Creation!

For this weeks blog post I decided to gear away from my weekly clay project. I wanted to share a different project that I had been working on this semester that relates to our recent class topic of cheap, and previous topics of crafting as a means of saving money. Last Summer I lived in New York City for six weeks. New York is the capital of great shopping with familiar and unique stores all around you. While shopping around in the City I saw a pair of shoes at this little boutique that I loved! They were black high top Chuck Taylor Converse shoes that had studs all over the side of the shoe that faces out. I loved these shoes because I thought they were so unique and trendy, but I looked at the price tag and they were $500! I was amazed to see how expensive these shoes were considering regular converse shoes cost around $45. I thought $500 was crazy for a pair of gym shoes with a bunch of studs on them, and decided that I would be absolutely crazy to buy this pair of shoes at that price and they will most likely go out of style in a year. Usually when I see something I really like and I don’t like it I usually forget about it, but when I walked away and didn’t buy those shoes I could not stop thinking about how much I loved them. I kept thinking about them and a thought came to my mind that I could easily make these shoes.

Over the years I have loved making craft projects and I have always been very good at them and have made some great stuff, and have even used studs like the ones on the shoes. I thought I could buy the plain black Chuck Taylor Converse shoes at a store and do the studding myself.  I had this idea in my head for a while but didn’t have time to get the materials until this Christmas Break. I bought the shoes at a discount shoe for $39.95 and ordered a studding kit online that was about $20. The kit included two tools that you use to punch holes to put the studs in, and it also included three bags of different size studs. I got my stud kit in the mail and started making the shoes. The shoes were not very difficult to make but it was very time consuming and it hurt my fingers, because each hole had to be punched by hand and the prongs on the studs had to be bended back by hand. I also did not have directions on the design of the shoes that I saw over the summer, so I had to try and remember what I saw and use my own creative ability.  This took me about six hours to finish the pair of shoes. The shoes turned out great, but they do not look exactly the same, because the first one I did was not as neat because I was teaching myself how to do this and getting a hang of the whole process.

The whole process of making these shoes relates to many of the concepts that we have been discussing in class, such as creating and making projects in order to save money. In this case my motivation for making these shoes was to save money, and I saved about $440. It would have been a lot easier for me to purchase the shoes at the store that already had the studs on it, but putting my time and effort into making these shoes made me feel a sense of accomplishment and success that I saved all that money and made them myself. I wear the shoes all the time and get so many compliments on them, and people can barley believe me when I tell them I made them myself. Since I have gotten so many compliments on the shoes I would love to try and sell them! Seeing people’s reaction to my shoes and their reaction when I tell them I made them is better than any $500 pair of shoes! For my future blogs I plan on continuing my clay work, and maybe try making projects with the clay that are not beads. 

Here are the studs I used and one of the tools I used to put the studs on the shoes. I finished these shoes about two months ago and have misplaced the other tool. 

The final Product!!