Twinkletoes DIY style

Are you a fan of A Pair & a Spare? I have been ever since some friends got me hooked on its DIY goodness and the super style of its creator (how many ladies do you know who can wear a bathmat as a dress and look amazing?). One of the projects that most caught my eye (admittedly because it was shiny, and shiny things distract me) were the boots with glitter heels. Not owning any boots that I could doctor in this way, I instead turned to some shoes that were not getting much wear because they looked like this:

I got them years ago at Gap when I lived in Tokyo, but have since learned enough about my personal style to know that I just don’t do great big bows on anything, let alone wedge heels. So they were a prime target for some revamping. I unpicked the bows from them (and put them away, as they will no doubt come in handy for a future project), bought some glue and unearthed a bag of glitter from out of the garage.

I know what you’re probably thinking – why did there just happen to have a huge bag of glitter in the garage? Well, my dad used to be an industrial chemist at a flooring company, and some of the flooring had glitter in it (maybe they were outfitting discos? It was the ’70s, after all). And let’s just say that this bag was, um, left over, so dad brought it home with him. I noticed it when I was cleaning out the garage years ago. I might have mentioned just a few times that I come from a family of hoarders. You never know when you’re going to need a jumbo sized bag of gold glitter, which would be why no one had thrown it out!

Now this is where I stopped taking photos for you, mainly because there’s a proper tutorial on A Pair and a Spare, but also because my hands were too busy holding shoes and covering them with glue and dipping them into the bag of glitter and trying to patch up the gaps which you can see in this photo.


Basically I spread craft glue over the outside-facing part of the wedges, extending it to just inside the instep as you can see here on my left foot.

This was mainly because I got lazy, but I decided I could say it was part of the design! I quite like it, although I do need to tidy it up a bit as I didn’t spread the glue on very precisely.

I was also going to add something like bright pink tassels or pom poms to the front of the shoes and change the straps but haven’t got around to that. What do you think, do you like my new sparkly shoes just as they are, or do they need more bling?