Rainy Day Ithaca

See, the thing about Ithaca is that there are many, many, many totally awesome things to do when it's sunny. You can hike in one of the numerous local state parks (always my first choice), you can go to the Farmer's Market and spend half a day wandering around, heck you can just walk around town and shop on the Commons or admire the beautiful houses and gardens. You can head up to Cornell and walk around the Plantations and the Arboretum and have some ice cream at the Cornell Dairy or Bubble Tea at The Old Teahouse in Collegetown. But if it's raining, things get a little bit more difficult. And since Sarah and I are both on budgets, it gets even harder to try and find entertainment on a rainy day, as most of my trip to Ithaca was. We, however, stumbled on a rather awesome solution to the rainy day blues. On your next rainy day, when you feel cooped up and in need of some inexpensive entertainment, may we suggest going to your local big box craft store and spending $10? There are so many entertaining things to be found there, but we settled on painting shoes.

Painting shoes, you might ask? Yes, painting shoes. We found acceptable slip-ons at the craft store and procured a number of puffy paints in colors appropriate for painting dragons.

Then, we took to the internet in search of dragon-y inspiration. I sketched out what I wanted on a scrap of paper.

Then, we sketched our ideas on the shoes. I used regular old pencil, but Sarah used a white colored pencil since she chose black shoes.


Then, simply paint away, giggling madly at your genius. Sarah did hers all in one go, but I let mine dry a bit and finished off the detail work. Oh, and my we also suggest letting them dry on the top of the fridge if there is a cat around? Cats and puffy paint do not mix.

And there you have two very different takes on dragon shoes. Sarah went for a more gothic, kind of Dungeons and Dragons, sort of motorcycle girl approach with all kinds of super cool flames and abstract dragons.

Her feet are on fire because she's so hot! I chose a more fairy tale, literal kind of dragon.

My absolute favorite part (besides the two of us wearing them out together and hoping that people notice) is the dragons I painted on the back. This isn't a completely finished shot - there's more to the flames now - but I love the gold sparkly belly and the little horns.

Oh, hey, and if you're thinking to yourself, "Well, now I've got all this puffy paint, what do I do next?" Well, you can puffy paint more shoes, or you can get yourself a piece of wax paper and make stickies for your windows. Paint right on the wax paper, let them dry, peel them off, give them a lick, and stick them anywhere! I now have a little sea forest on the bottom of my bathroom mirror!

It is clear that I am a bad blogger, because I have a bunch of backed up FOs to show off (not to mention a trip to the yarn store to admit to). One step at a time...