DIY: Shoe Puffs — the little onion

A few weeks ago my sweet friend sent me this picture and said, “next DIY??”

They’re so cute! And festive! And whimsical! And bright! And … *cue record scratch noise* …

THEY COST SEVEN HUNDRED DOLLARS??

If you are a person who spends $700 on flats, I respectfully have so many questions:

1) What is it that you do for a living, and is that skill set teachable?

2) Are you scared to walk outside in your shoes? Do you maybe wear those little scrub booties that they make me wear on our neighborhood home tour, but every time you leave the house? What if it rains? Do you ever get the heel stuck in sidewalk cracks and scratch the leather, or is that just me? Do you keep all of the dust bags your shoes come with and actually use them, or do your shoes live in tiny climate controlled shoe houses?

3) Can we hang out? Obviously I won’t stand too close to your shoes and I’ll leave the county to sneeze or ingest any food or beverages.

As for me and my house, we will buy our shoes at Target or Goodwill. But now that I know pompom flats exist, I can’t un-see them. Time for a little DIY project!

I had fun putting these guys together, and realized that if I attach them to my shoes using a sturdy but removable clip, that they’re suddenly versatile and can be worn on virtually any shoe:

You’ll Need:

Assorted colors leather (I used 2 different assorted colors from Hobby Lobby)
Alligator clips
Scissors
Hot glue

Assembly

Cut each color of leather in half, one half for each pom pom
Make two pom poms out of leather ribbons (tie each with a ~6” piece of one of the colors of leather, or another strong cord)
- If you’re new to pompom making, you can see how to make one the easy way (using your hands) here, or using a pompom maker here.
Hot glue clip onto pompom (I picked the ugliest side because this will become the bottom)

And now you have leather shoe poms that you can put on ANY pair of shoes you want! These cost $7 to make (leather and clips were half off), ringing in at 1/100th the cost of my inspiration.

Compared to the Louboutins, I think the ability to wear mine on any shoe is preferable, but Christian’s pompoms look fluffier. If I make another pair, I may buy 50-100% more leather to make the poms bigger and fuller, although I suspect it would be very hard to tightly secure the pom pom around the middle with much more leather than I was working with (it doesn’t compress like yarn does). You really have to put your back into it to securely tie these poms.

And the search continues for something that doesn’t get better when you add a pom pom to it…

Toodles, tlo