Old to the New Navy

We are back from the Mile High City and let me tell you, traveling with toddlers is no easy undertaking! We spent two hours on a bus and two and half hours on a plane, both ways. I won’t go into details on the crazy but let’s just say we’ve sworn off major travel for severalllll months until there’s a little more independence amongst the toddlers in the fam and, therefore, a little more sanity amongst the adults. ;)

So, moving on…

I’ve been drooling over these K & Elphy sandals for the girls:

[image via K & Elphy]

But, at $56 a pair, they’re way out of the park when it comes to our tiny budget.

So, armed with a gift card I’ve had since Christmas, I bought a couple of pairs of these from Old Navy:

[image via Old Navy]
With a 30% discount code, I got them for about $11 each. The thing about them though is that, while they’re cute with the fabric flowers, I feel like they’re a little too top heavy and being that the flowers are very notneutral colors, I’d have a hard time pairing them with every outfit I bedeck the girls in. So, I bought them with the intention to change things up a little.

And change them I did…

A little bit different than how they came packaged, right? Improvisation at it’s finest. When I can’t have the ones I really want, I get them in a slightly different way.

I was 90% sure I could take the flowers off the sandals when ordering them since I removed the bows off these shoes last year pretty easily and I was right. All I had to do was remove the stitches holding the flowers on using a seam ripper.

See the stitches?

The stitching around the outside of the bottom of the felt piece holding the flower on was the same color as the stitching along the faux leather sides of the t-strap (does that make any sense?) so I had to be really careful that what I was ripping was the flower stitching and not the actual stitching holding the shoe together.

One down, one to go:

The flowers will make some cute headbands or clips sometime in the future. :)

After I had both flowers off, I measured the t-strap into six even sections and painted those sections starting with white. I didn’t paint the very top of the t-strap, where it meets the top strap, for no reason other than just because. I just stuck to painting inside the stitching on the strap.

When the white was dry, I went in and painted on the black. I used regular acrylic paint so the paint dried pretty fast and I was able to get both shoes done in about 20 minutes. Originally I was going to use puff paint so you wouldn’t be able to see the tiny holes left behind from the stitching but the paint filled them in pretty well and I’m really loving the matte finish of the acrylic so we’ll see how it holds up in the long run. So far, so good!

I love how they turned out! Anthony isn’t the biggest fan of them but I’m hoping they’ll grow on him. :)

(Side note: Old Navy also has these sandals which, if you painted the front strap, would imitate the K & Elphy’s even more but I wasn’t sure if paint would stick to the patent faux leather so I went with the t-straps instead.)

I took the girls outside in the rain this morning to grab the ‘after’ pictures and caught more than I needed so it’s only makes sense to share them. I don’t like black and white stripes at all apparently…

My bribe of “I’ll let you hold my umbrella” was a winner and they leapt out the door to do so.

Oh and their scarves! I debuted them to Instagram a couple of weeks ago but I might as well give the low down here since this is supposedly a DIY blog or something… I found this long-sleeved tee on clearance (I found it for 70% off in-store but click the link to find it 50% off online!) at Target last month and knew it’d make great infinity scarves for the girls. I grabbed the biggest size they had. To get the scarves out of it, I first cut off the top portion by cutting off the bottom of the tee right under each armpit. Then I cut the big square that gave me down the middle so I had two halves of the bottom of the tee.

Placing the right sides of fabric together for each piece, I sewed the two cut sides together and that’s it! You could totally do this with no-sew tape too – see this tutorial. Since it’s cotton, I didn’t hem the top (the bottom was already hemmed since it was the bottom of the tee) because it won’t fray.

I’m kinda wishing I’d have gotten another for myself! :)

. . .

I hope it’s nicer in your neck of the woods than it is in ours. Our forecast shows nothing but rain and thunderstorms for the next five days and that just makes this moms cabin fever warning siren go off loud and clear. The last time I took the kids out in the rain I lost my car keys so I’m going to pretend I learned from that mistake and stay inside the casa…until desperation plays devil’s advocate and I suddenly find myself and the kids wandering those dangerous-to-the-wallet aisles of Target… ;)