Neat Dyed Sneakers – Turning Around a Craft FAIL!

So this post is totally impromptu and is actually the failing of a project I was working on. Now I could act like I totally knew that this crazy, fun pattern would occur to make some neat dyed shoes if I did something just this way, but that would be a big, fat lie. I didn’t and when I first saw my shoes I was terribly disappointed because I had forgotten about them and they went off the rails because of it.

BUT when I got over the OH, NO I’VE FAILED moment I got into the OH, MY THESE SUCKERS ARE FREAKING COOL moment. The second one felt a lot better. And you may wonder – how can you post a fail when you didn’t know what went wrong to create a post so that other scan imitate it? That’s easy enough… I kept dyeing sneakers until I recreated the effect! So now I have several pairs of green-ish shoes :) But let’s get on with it, shall we?

For this project you will need:

• White sneakers (mine are from WalMart, just under $6)
• Tulip Tie Dye in your choice of color (mine is green)

Here are my white sneakers. I only tried this with the ones from WalMart so I know they’ll work but I don’t know if, say, you grab a pair at Target that they will. I have no reason to assume they won’t but nothing in life is black and white and since I didn’t test on other shoes I cannot recommend others.

This started off being an ombre sneaker tutorial and THAT obviously was a fail.

Wet your shoes down really well and cover the shoes in your dye. Be liberal with the dye. It goes super far.

Cover them completely and walk them to the kitchen sink…

and rinse them off just at the toe area. Completely ignore the heel. Some of the color will come out but focus on the toe area. Not even the middle, really, it will start to wash out just from the nearness of the water on the toe. Empty the extra water out of the shoes and set them aside to dry.

Now this is where things deviate from the normal dyed shoe project… normally you’d wrap the shoes up nice and tight so that the dye stays wet. BUT we want the dye to dry because that’s when it starts into the crazy, sharp angled lines for some reason.

Everything is always darker when wet and these shoes are no exception. Here they are in the mid-day sun and they’ve been sitting out for 2-3 hours. It’s crazy humid here so they’re still quite damp but on their way! See how you can already start to see the separation of the colors?

The thing I find most interesting, is that the dye settled in the same places on both shoes on every pair. Crazy, huh? After they’ve dried fully once, you need to rinse out the excess dye (or else risk dyeing your feet when they sweat) and let them dry again. This will lighten up the colors a bit but they’re still awesome. And if you decide to try going without rinsing them, let me know how that goes for ya!

When they are completely dry you can lace ’em up and rock them out!

Now, I must say that I wore these suckers all around Houston yesterday and stomped through puddles galore as a torrential rainstorm hit early on. And they didn’t bleed or stain my feet. Pretty sweet!

What do you think of my accidentally awesome shoes? DO you want a pair or do you think they should have stayed firmly in the FAIL vault?!?