I don't know about all of you, but I'm celebrating a very old tradition today. Chinese food and movies! Well...not entirely true. It's going to be Japanese food, but I'm still in the oriental family, right?
But seeing as not all of my friends are lucky enough to be Jewish, like me, I obviously have a list of Christmas presents to hand out to my favorite people in the entire world. Well, one girl in particular, essentially my other half - the evil twin in most ways. We're pretty much one person split into two, basically long lost sisters. And seeing as how we have everything in common besides parents, there's a common love of Harry Potter between us. We're both Slytherins, as luck would have it. So for the wonderful holidays, HP was the direction I took for her present.
Actually...this is how I came upon my idea. Well, as seen in my last post, another friend of mine asked for Toms painted with Mickey and Minnie mouse which I made for her birthday. Not knowing where to get Toms, since I, myself, never wear the things, I asked Kaitlin -my other half. Then, as I surfed Pinterest (always Pinterest!) I came across some really lovely Ravenclaw Toms. I sent a picture of them to my Kaitlin, saying that they would be *totally awesome* in Slytherin style. (Heh, did you get my Very Potter Musical reference there? Heh heh) Well my twin here replied by asking, all excited, if I was making her Slytherin Toms, which would explain why I asked her where to buy them?! Alas...that was not my logic at all...so I told her politely that, no, I wasn't planning on making them, sadly. And I really wasn't. I just thought the shoes looked cool. But now I had the perfect present to give her for Christmas, and this way she would still be pleasantly surprised to see the shoes. :)
And that's when I began the quest for the perfect design. So I opened Pinterest back up, as always, and searched for Slytherin Toms. I came across these bad boys which came from haleykayarts Deviantart account. I really like the idea of having the house crest there, but I didn't want to do exactly the same shoe not only out of respect for the original artist but also so that, heaven forbid the shoes were too small for Kaitlin, I could always sell them on Etsy or something later. Luckily I did have the right size shoes, and all was well! xD
So then I set out to find a standard house crest to work from and this here is what I came up with.
Then I got off my lazy butt and went in search of supplies. After many tedious hours of gathering the energy to get out of the house, I went to several stores and got these gray Toms. I also bought some more of those craft paints I used in my last post for those Mickey and Minnie shoes. This time I got gold, silver, green, and yellow. Plus I used the black and white paints. I also had my black sharpie paint pen, which is really handy for more or less sketching out designs. And I like how shiny the sharpie paint looks when it dries, too.
Last is the brushes which I stocked up on at my local grocery store. I also talked about these in that last post, but basically it's a bag of 25 brushes for $5 and they're really surprisingly good quality. The only real problem I had was that there weren't any brushes small enough to get really fine details. What I found myself doing was painting things thicker than I needed them, and then painting over the edges with another color to create the really fine lines. But that's still a rather risky way to go about it...
Now, I didn't document the whole process but I started out with the green shield in the middle, got the snake on, then put in the scroll that says Slytherin on the bottom. From there I did the knight's helmet and worked the scrollwork down the sides. And even though I started this about two weeks before Christmas, I still found myself scrambling at the last minute to finish them. So the details on either side of the shield don't entirely match up to the house crest itself, but it really isn't that big of a deal, and I still like it. Then I painted around it in green -mostly to cover my many mistakes and partly to cover more of the shoe. And I went with a snitch on the second shoe which I really don't care for honestly, but I had no time to do anything better. And this time crunch also prevented me from getting stripes or anything else onto the shoes. This is the final result that I was left with in the end and, aside from the less impressive snitch, I am really happy with the shoes in general. And I do love how the crest came out with.
So that's the story! Let me know if there's anything I can make for you, and I hope everyone is having a wonderful holiday season! Happy New Year everyone!
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