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If you can’t find the perfect shoes on the high street, why not revamp an old pair? Perri Lewis shows you how to master the little-known art of decoupage …
Craft isn’t always about thrift. Of course, sometimes it is cheaper to buy the materials and knock up a dress/birthday card/cushion cover by hand, but if all you are interested in is saving a bit of cash, you’d be better off going to Primark for a jumper than trying to knit one from scratch.
No, making stuff yourself isn’t necessarily about getting something for less money. It’s about getting something that you absolutely, 100% want, rather than having to settle for a close approximation of that perfect bag/rug/picture frame, because it’s all you could find on the high street.
I’ve been trawling said high street for a while now and, as I should have realised at the beginning of my search, the pair of shoes that I want just don’t exist at the moment. Not in the places I shop, anyway.
The solution? To make my own, of course.
Using a few stamps and a lick of decoupage glue, I turned a pair of scuffed black stilettos that I rarely wore into the shoes I have trying to find for months.
Old leather/faux leather shoes (if you can wipe them clean, you can decoupage them)
Instant decoupage water-based glue, sealer and finish, in gloss
Paint brush
Stamps, or any thin paper (thin wrapping paper can work well, as can newspaper and pages from glossy magazines)
Scissors
Ribbon, buttons, other embellishments (optional)
Super glue (optional)
A pair of old shoes: £0
80 stamps: £4 from a charity shop
Glue, sealer and finish: about £6, available from most craft stores (I used a third of a 236ml pot for this project)
1. Give your shoes a good clean before you start.
2. If you are using stamps, you don’t need to do any preparation, but if you want to cover your shoes with thin paper, cut or rip it into small, stamp-sized pieces now (the next few steps can be messy, and it’s not easy to use scissors when your fingers are covered in decoupage glue).
3. Use your paintbrush to coat a small area of your shoe with decoupage glue, and cover the back of a stamp with it too. Stick the stamp on to the glue-covered section of the shoe and use your fingers to smooth down any wrinkles.
4. Stick another stamp on, slightly overlapping the first one you stuck down. Continue adding stamps this way until the entire shoe is covered: you may need to cut some of your stamps so they fit the curves of the shoe. I didn’t decoupage the heels of my shoes, but you can do if you want to.
5. Cover the outside of the shoe in a layer of decoupage glue, and paint over any stamps you folded into the inside of the shoe. Leave it to dry. Add another coat or two to make it uber-shiny and as waterproof as possible.
6. Add a bow, button, or any other embellishments.
• Make sure you use waterproof decoupage glue and remember that, although it will protect your shoes from rain, splashing around in puddles is best avoided.
• If you make a mistake you have a few seconds to remove the offending stamp before the decoupage glue starts to set. If a few seconds has passed, it is better to cover it with a new stamp rather than peel it off and risk ripping the stamp underneath.
• Leave the point of the shoe until last, as it is the hardest part to cover. Either use lots of little pieces of paper to cover it, or use one big stamp, folded strategically.
• Don’t worry if your shoes don’t match. It is far too time-consuming to make an identical pair of decoupage shoes, so make the fact each shoe is different into a feature.
• If you really can’t live with the fact that each shoe is different, add a bow or other embellishment to each shoe so they look like a pair.
• Scuffed your newly decoupaged shoes? Not an issue. Just cover the mark with a new stamp and give the area surrounding it another coat of decoupage glue.
More of Perri’s crafty musings at makeanddowithperri.wordpress.com
Have you been inspired by this week’s craft project? Have you ever tried revamping a pair of heels, or even making shoes from scratch? Let us know in the comments section below
VIEWPOINT
Andrew Mitchell
The world’s tropical forests face the double challenge of climate change and deforestation, says Andrew Mitchell. In this week’s Green Room, he explains why he is not giving up on the "impossible dream" of convincing governments that these trees are worth more alive than dead.
"Paying a premium to prevent the loss of the Amazon could be one of the best insurance policies planet Earth has on offer"
Rumour has it that Brad Pitt is going into the Amazon.
He will play out the story of an enigmatic explorer in search of his personal El Dorado.
The explorer in question was Colonel Percy Fawcett, a highly resilient English surveyor who set off almost 85 years ago on his final expedition into the Amazon.
Fawcett, a celebrated veteran of many journeys into the unknown, secretly believed he had discovered scientific evidence of a lost civilisation within the vastness of what today is known as the Xingu, in north-eastern Brazil.
Despite mounting evidence to the contrary, he remained resolute and journeyed repeatedly into the forest, determined to find it.
Newspapers published despatches detailing his quest for many months, but then all news ceased.
Like Livingstone 50 years before him, Fawcett had vanished into a dark continent; only this time, no-one ever found him.
‘Impossible dream’
After three decades at the conservation frontline, much of it now encased in concrete jungles searching for a seemingly impossible solution to inexorable rainforest destruction, I am beginning to feel a little bit like Percy Fawcett.
Perhaps I am on the trail of an impossible dream.
Fawcett gave his elusive goal the cryptic name of "Z".
The same could equally apply to the El Dorado that I and many others have been searching for: an economic argument to convince governments that the standing rainforest could be worth more alive than dead.
Key role of forests ‘may be lost’
The fact that tropical forests continue to go up in flames, contributing seven billion tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere annually (more than all the world’s cars, ships and planes), suggests that my Amazonian "Z" may not exist.
Unless, that is, a completely new way to discover it exists.
A clutch of events last week offer several apparently contradictory clues as to how my El Dorado might be found.
At the UN Forum on Forests (UNFF), currently in session in New York, the International Union of Forest Research Organisations (IUFRO) released a report on Adaptation of Forests and People to Climate Change.
It contained the projection that rising global temperatures may condemn forests over the next century to become fire-strewn savannahs, whatever efforts governments may take to conserve them.
This resonates with the finding, recently published in the journal Science, that the Amazon’s trees capture a whopping two billion tonnes of CO2 annually; but that during the devastating Amazon drought of 2005, they released five billion tonnes back out again.
Some journalists have asked in response: "What’s the point in saving the Amazon, if it’s doomed anyway"
Our common reaction in the face of these uncertainties is to believe that the risks of doing nothing are less than any remedial action we could take.
In this case, the reverse is almost certainly true.
Take cover
Oliver Phillips - the lead author of the Science paper - Yadvinder Malhi of Oxford University, I and others have indicated that halting deforestation may increase the forest’s resilience to climate change.
So, my view is that far from reducing efforts to halt deforestation, we should redouble them.
Let me put it another way: if a person has malaria and you want to save their life by keeping their temperature down, surely the worst way to do it is to keep kicking them in the stomach or even amputating their legs.
At the Summit of the Americas last week in Trinidad, a Blueprint for a Sustainable Energy Partnership for the Americas was presented to the many heads of state who attended the summit.
"If you were in charge of a departing flight in which there was a 10% chance of the aircraft crashing, would you recommend that everyone happily remain in their seats whilst an argument ensued over probabilities"
One of its three components was a new "vision for the Amazon". But what has the Amazon got to do with energy
Brazil is a leader in green power, with 40% of its cars being run on bioethanol from sugarcane and 70% of its electricity sourced from hydropower.
Even in the Sao Paulo hotel where I am writing this, lights in the corridor only come on when I walk through.
The connection between energy and the Amazon is water.
The evapotranspiration of the Amazon’s trees, which generates billions of tonnes of water each day, may significantly underpin food and energy security in the region.
Dr Jose Marengo, a scientist at Brazil’s space research agency (INPE), has postulated that a proportion of this moisture is carried south on a low-level atmospheric jet stream across southern Brazil and down to the La Plata Basin.
If so, this vast volume of water helps sustain a trillion dollar agricultural industry, feeds hydropower, and could prove to be essential to Brazil’s booming biofuel industry.
It seems to me that a new way of looking at the Amazon is to consider it as a locally owned "eco-utility", which is providing ecosystem services across regional and global distances that currently no-one pays for.
It is likely that these services are potentially worth a great deal to those who deliver them and to businesses whose prosperity depends on them.
A 10% fall in rainfall over time - less than some conservative predictions - could deliver a 40% drop in river flow, for example.
Perversely, beneficiaries such as Brazilian beef and soy farmers are at the same time potentially undermining their future success. through their expansion into the forest.
An international bank investing in agriculture and hydropower in the region might legitimately ask if the former investment is, in fact, weakening the latter.
Could the beneficiaries therefore be persuaded to pay a tax to maintain the services
Doing so might make the Amazon worth more standing up than cut down. This would help sustain global food and energy security, worth billions to national economies.
Hidden value
The question that businesses and policymakers will want answered is whether continued deforestation could make the giant soy fields of Mato Grosso dry up or the lights go out in Buenos Aires.
At INPE last week, I was privileged to join some of the region’s leading scientists, economists and community development specialists to brainstorm the idea of valuing the Amazon as an "eco-utility".
The meeting was funded under an innovative new UK government programme called Ecosystem Services and Poverty Alleviation (ESPA).
We concluded that we can’t really be sure where the rain goes, and argued over its possible reduction, ranging from a lot to a little.
Yet we were convinced that a new positive incentive system was needed, and that a year of effort lay ahead to figure out how it might work.
Our scientific caution is understandable; but for a policymaker, is it really the point
If you were in charge of a departing flight in which the captain announced the destination was uncertain but the engineer said there was a 10% chance of the aircraft crashing, would you recommend that everyone happily remain in their seats whilst an argument ensued over probabilities
I believe the credit crunch, climate change, and consumer appetites are creating a crucial tipping point in this historical debate, which will determine how the world’s political process deals with the erosion one of the greatest natural capital assets on Earth.
If I can echo Einstein: it is unlikely that Amazonian nations will be able to solve this problem with the same thinking that caused it.
Although the Amazon belongs to no-one else but these nations and their people, how it fares affects us all, and so is a scientific, political and economic intelligence test for everyone.
Fawcett’s ecological ignorance hid the Amazon’s true value, which was all around him.
His El Dorado exists today as the vast Xingu Reserve, a land of forests quietly maintaining our resilience because the indigenous communities have maintained theirs.
But will the forests Fawcett once journeyed through disappear
Will my "Z" in the Amazon become a romantic metaphor for an ineffective environmental Zeitgeist
I do not know; but expecting science to offer a certainty that it can never deliver excuses inaction and stokes risk.
Who among us has refused to buy insurance because we cannot know accurately when our house will burn down or exactly when our car will be stolen
Paying a premium to prevent the loss of the Amazon could be one of the best insurance policies planet Earth has on offer.
Andrew Mitchell is founder and director of the Global Canopy Programme
The Green Room is a series of opinion articles on environmental topics running weekly on the BBC News website
Do you agree with Andrew Mitchell Are tropical forests worth more alive than dead Are you hopeful that the international community will be able to find a way to stop deforestation Or is the idea that we can halt the demise of the world’s forests an impossible dream
Send us your comments using the form below:
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
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