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When I was a kid I got a mood ring and I was totally obsessed with it. It had one of those bendable ring bases so you can make it bigger or smaller so it wasn’t exactly the fanciest thing around but that didn’t matter to me at all. My dad got it for me at a gas station when I was amazed by the way it would change colors. We were on vacation and during our trip I’d look at my ring and the little card that came with it and try to decipher my current mood. Apparently I was constantly stressed :) I think I had it maybe a week before I lost it somewhere and I was disappointed.
Flash forward to today and I now know what kind of crazy magic lies behind these temperature color changing mood rings and I also know that it’s all a ruse! Though I cannot attest to whether or not I was stressed, I highly doubt I was since I was just a little kid on vacation, I know that the reading had more to do with my temperature than my mood.
I’ve found the stuff that is used to make mood rings and it’s called Liquid Crystal and you can get it from SolarColorDust.com. Now you’ve heard that name a lot for a few reasons… they sell awesome pigments and whatnot that can make these amazing science-experiment type crafts that are so. much. fun.
[ngg_images source=”galleries” container_ids=”7″ exclusions=”43″ sortorder=”46,44,42,45,43″ display_type=”photocrati-nextgen_basic_imagebrowser” ajax_pagination=”1″ order_by=”sortorder” order_direction=”ASC” returns=”included” maximum_entity_count=”500″]Can you dig all of that color change amazing-ness? Oh, and DIY scratch and sniff paint, too, people. I LOVE THAT PAINT :)
And guess what? You might have noticed from the side bar that I’m soon to be a brand ambassador, of sorts, for SolarColorDust.com and soon I’m going to be sharing some projects with you from the stash of goodies I got sent a few weeks back, so be sure to take a peek back because that portfolio of SCD projects is going to grow by a few every month. Super cool, right? Huzzah!
But these shoes are super awesome, too and totally call for their time in the spotlight, so here we go!
For this project you will need:
- Mood Paint
- Black sneakers
- Small paintbrush
Mood paint needs to be used on a black surface for the color change to be visible. To make things easier I decided to purchase black sneakers and start anew but it is possible to paint an older pair of shoes black and totally re-purpose them.
These are Converse because, as far as my sister is concerned, they are the be all end all of shoes. I found black Converse with black rubber soles and then the more traditional white rubber soled black Converse with white laces. After talking to Jen I ordered up some of the all black beauties for this project.
Give your Mood Paint a really good shake and carefully remove the lid.
Carefully dab a small paint brush into the bottle and paint directly onto the shoe. Cover the shoe where you want the color change to occur (I went with anything canvas) and allow to fully dry.
You’ll need 2-3 coats though I recommend 2. With 2 I got acceptable color change and the third coat dried sort of like glaze on a doughnut, kind of flaky in spots. In the end, it makes my color changes look a bit “hazy” so go ahead and try the 2 and see how that works.
If your color changes aren’t strong enough go for a third taking care to paint that last coat on super evenly (also might have been a bit of my problem).
Once dry you can place your hands onto the canvas to see if your body heat changes the color. Here I barely blew onto the mood painted canvas with my breath and it was enough to make the shoes start to turn brown-ish red. Even though it’s pretty faint you can still see it, isn’t that cool? I SO felt like a dragon or something :)
Now to really see what’s going down bring out the big boy, a hair dryer to really see that business CHANGE!
Now these shoes are on their way to my sister but Rob and I happened to have them in the car on a little lunch trip to South Padre Island. It’s only a 20-30 minute drive so when we want to get out of the house sometimes we’ll head out there for lunch and spend a little time on the beach. It seemed like a great time to play with the shoes and we got some really fun results with the varying temperatures.
Starting off a dark blue out of the back of Rob’s hot car, the shoes started to slide into a pretty cobalt blue as we neared the water. You could literally feel the air cooling the closer you got and when held up in the air the shoes would cool further to a pretty green color. As Rob snapped pics I played around with holding the shoes up in the air and pushing them into the sand to see what colors I could get with the different temperatures. Pretty cool, right?
I just can’t wait to see what my sister thinks of them! I have a feeling I’ll be making a few other pairs for family members soon. Everybody’s gonna want them! :)