How to Cover Shoes With Fabric to Give Your Heels a New Lease on Life
It’s hard to get rid of old shoes that don’t look so great anymore but still fit, feel comfortable, and are structurally just fine. It turns out you don’t have to get rid of them! Follow this tutorial to learn how to cover shoes with fabric and give them a whole new life.
Tools and materials:
- Old shoes
- Stretchy polyester fabric
- All-purpose adhesive glue
- Rotary cutters
1. Cover the top of your shoe
Once you have selected the fabric you want to cover your shoe with, apply glue where the top of the shoe meets the sole of the shoe, on one side of the shoe only.
Fold in the edge of the fabric and place it on top of the glue line at the edge of your shoe.
Now pull the fabric over the shoe, stretching it around the toe. Make sure you are pulling and stretching and not folding. You want to keep the fabric nice and tight and smooth.
Apply glue to the other side of the shoe as you did on the first side.
Glue the fabric in place, keeping it smooth and tight. Press the fabric into the groove where the top of the shoe meets the sole to help keep it in place and get a clean line.
2. Trim fabric
Trim away excess fabric leaving about a half-inch of fabric to fold under the top of the shoe.
3. Finish the inside edge
Apply glue to the inside of the top of the shoe and glue the fabric to the inside.
4. Do a final trim
Let the glue thoroughly dry and then use rotary cutters to trim the rest of the excess fabric at the groove line where the top of the shoe meets the sole.
How to cover shoes with fabric
What a great transformation from an old pair of shoes to a beautiful new pair.
The trick to covering shoes with fabric is to make sure you use a stretchy polyester fabric. That will give you a nice smooth covering.
I bet you’ll want to find more old shoes for this DIY shoe covering technique. Leave a comment to let me know how it worked out for you!
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Where did you find that fabric? It's beautiful! I have a bedspread that my Mother gave me a while back and would like to make some curtains and pillows for the room? I've looked everywhere!!! Great job BTW!
Rebekah, This is brilliant and thank you for sharing the info you found. You can also cover whole shoes with fabric and not just polyester. To do this with the curves of the shoe you have to make little diagonal snips in the fabric so that it will conform to the shoe, the same in what is done in sewing when putting two edges together that are curved. :)