PAINT your OLD SHOES, it's AN OPPORTUNITY FOR GREAT ART.
AFTER YOU READ THIS ARTICLE, your OLD SHOES will BECOME CONVERSATION STOPPERS (or at very least, door stoppers)
IN A RECESSION, YOUR OLD SHOES and those of your family will
become very valuable to you. As each pair you have on hand, and
can renovate, allows you not to spend fifty bucks on a NEW PAIR.
Tennies are easy. You drop them in washer. But HOW TO FIX LEATHER SHOES
without recourse to a shoe fixer man?
http://www.missprissstyle.com/item/Hand_painted_Monogram_Shoes/655
There are several methods for breathing life into worn-out shoes. Tell you what, while you still have a dollar, ask the SHOE MAN what he does. Watch him work on a pair of your old shoes. Ask him what polish he gets, or does he make his own. Later, when the full on Impoverishment hits, SHOE POLISH will be so expensive that you won't even think of buying it, not when food is so costly and rare. NOT TO WORRY, the potassium rich oils on the inside of a banana skin do such a great job. And the most wonderful feature of this is, every single time you or the kids eat a banana, it reminds them to take a pair of shoes down and fix them! No eating bananas if you don't use that peel. It would be like throwing away shoe polish and that stuff is 3$ a jar!
HOW TO POLISH SHOES WITH A BANANA, SEE:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/01/28/polish-your-shoes-with-a_n_161559.html
CLEANING SHOES - Give your shoes a cleaning before you polish
them. You can do this with
some water and a dry cloth. This will help to remove any dirt or build-up
that has formed on your shoes as a result of normal wear.
Step2
Put some water in a pot and place it on your stove. Bring it to a boil
on
high heat and add beeswax. Melt completely. Stir in your bar of soap,
which
should have been grated into flakes.
Step3
Add your potassium carbonate to the water-wax mixture. You may see
some
foaming and this is normal. Keep boiling your mixture until it begins
to
form a paste-like consistency.
Step4
Turn your stove off and remove the pot. Add the gum powder, sugar and
charcoal into the pot and mix.
Step5
Place your new shoe polish in tin cans for storage. Allow them to cool
completely before placing the lid on top.
HOW TO MAKE YOUR OWN SHOE POLISH:
the red ones consist of a mixture of ox
blood and/or rouge (ferric oxide), beeswax or carnauba wax, paraffin
wax
(common candles) and/or beef fat, i.e. tallow, add a "drying" unsaturated
vegetable oil like linseed oil or tung oil, and a volatile solvent
to keep
it in a soft plastic state until applied. The black ones, instead of
ox
blood or ferric oxide, contain lampblack (soot) or powdered charcoal
or
coal; the brown ones contain both. There are "neutral" polishes which
contain neither ox blood/ferric oxide just fat, wax or oil. When you
see
waxes on sale at garage sales for a quarter, pick them up!
A SIMPLER RECIPE:
1. Combine one part lemon juice to two parts olive oil to form a polish.
2. Use a clean cloth to rub a small amount of the polish into your
shoes. Then, allow it to soak in for a few minutes.
3. Buff with another cloth
HOW TO Reuse very old, worn out TENNIS Shoes YOu're lucky if
you are one of
those people who rarely, if ever, throws away a useable pair of shoes.
When
the big DEPRESSION pf 2009 HITS, you'll need them. Scrub off all surface
mud/ dirt, use
hot water, detergent. Pull laces off, wash them, too, Then rinse. SOAK
THE TENNIS shoe
and the laces in 5% bleach solution in tepid water in a basin. A few
gallons will do it in the bottom of
a dish pan. Now, still wet, put them out in the sun. The bleach is
double down activated by sunlight.
After a few hours, Rinse well. Put in sun to dry. TENNIES can be made
almost new again.
Now, when dry, paint your TENNIS Shoes.get out your markers or
textile paints and start painting away. The laces can be dyed if
you leave white background on sneaker, but if you color the entire sneaker,
leave lace WHITE see:
http://fineartamerica.com/featured/orange-sneakers-laurie-pace.html
If the uppers are worn but not the soles, the shoes still have some
life
left in them. Cuz torn uppers are charming. They're like KEWL. HOT.
THEY ARE the BOMB! But they need to be bleached/washed and
then painted. They just need some freshening up. The fancy word for
this
is up-cycling. You can have great fun embellishing them with paint
and
other substances. Fabric paint or spray paint works best, but you can
experiment with practically any kind of paint. Permanent markers can
work
on light-colored shoes. Just make sure they’re thoroughly clean and
dry.
If you have some craft glue and sewing scraps around the house, replace
the
laces with colorful yarn, then glue on scraps of fabric, lace, and
buttons.
RECYCLE SHOES. The strap broke on your Manolos. No, you don’t
have the
money to repair them. Fine. Nobody ever promised they’d be shoes
forever. You can use them to hold keys and spare change, fill them
with
dirt and plant something in them, fill them with cement and make
door-stoppers out of them, store old necklaces in them, re-lace them
with
sparkly ribbon and put potpourri in them…the list is endless.
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