So I had this pair of shoes.
I'd been wanting black-and-white oxfords for a while, so when I found them online for under $20, I ordered them without worrying about how well they would fit. (Not well, it turns out.)
So after coming across a couple of ideas on pinterest, I decided to turn these cheap but comfy sneakers into oxfords.
Here are my inspiration pictures. I found the first one here, and I actually bought the materials for this project planning to copy it exactly. I figured black-and-white saddle shoes are just as cute and classic as black-and-white oxfords, right? But then this morning I found a second project idea here - she painted her shoes to look like actual oxfords! Both projects use the exact same shoes I bought - they were $5 at WalMart.
Materials: shoes, sharpie, and pencil. (The project I got the idea from used a fabric marker, but since I don't plan on putting my shoes through the washing machine I just went with regular sharpies.) If you already own markers, that would put the cost for this project at just $5 for the shoes. I bought the fat sharpie because I thought it would help me fill large areas faster but I ended up using the small one the whole time for more precision.
Trying to replicate the look of my oxfords as closely as possible, I started by sort of eyeballing the design on the toe. (I traced around a quarter for these curved bits to get them the same on both shoes.)
Then I drew in the zig-zag edge and the dots. For the zig-zag part it helps to pick up the marker between the zig and the zag - short strokes - to get crisper corners. For the dots, I didn't really think about how much the marker would bleed. None of them were small enough where it bled completely through, but it helps to draw them a little bigger than they have to be. Filling in around all the dots is the biggest pain but really didn't take that long all together.
My original shoe and my sneaker had different seams at the heel, so for the heel detail I just used the seams I was working with as my guide.
And added dots and filled it in just the same as the toe.
I also had to make it different from the original on the top part, but I was happy to add more black.
Aaaaaand the finished product!
I love them.
They're kind of a fun cartoon version of real oxfords.
Don't try to tell me that 22 is too old to be sharpie-ing all over my shoes - at least I finally got rid of my heavily-MCR-lyric-encrusted fake converse when we moved.
The black is sort of the color black jeans get after you wash them - you can see the white coming through in the background - but it's more uniform than this picture makes it look.
I still have to decide whether I should paint the tongue black and whether I should put the laces back on.
What do you think?
P.S. You can have my old oxfords if you're a size 6 and will see me or my parents in the near future! I barely wore them because they were so uncomfortable so they're pretty much new - I just have wide feet that are a little closer to 6.5 than 6 so they didn't work for me.
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