brain blobs and verbal vomit

Oh hey guys!  Nope, didn't forget that I have a blog.  Just can't really write about the things on my mind.  Perhaps one day my voice will not be stifled...until then - ON WITH THE CRAFTS!
So baseball season started this week and Monday is the home opened for my favorite boys with bats, the St. Louis Cardinals.

I had seen the below ad on Facebook the other day to win a pair of baseball flats from Khenri.com who does a lot of custom hand-painted work.
I never win anything and I am also too cheap -um, I mean THRIFTY to buy something that I could surely attempt to make on my own.

If you have seen my other crafty projects, you know that I am a hoarder of crafting supplies so you know I had everything on hand to do this.

I am not a flats girl really, more the casual canvas shoe (or boot girl in the winter)...so of course I had a white pair of canvas (yeah guys, CANVAS - like what art is painted on!) shoes to attempt this on.
My white canvas shoes were just too white so I removed the laces and used some tan acrylic paint and mixed with white.  Use lots of water and blend that around and get the darker and lighter shades going.

Then I looked up images of baseball ball stitching on those interwebs.  I decided to go a more "cartoony approach" with mine.  Doing it this way means it doesn't have to be perfect.

So I figured out how I wanted the stitching to go and drew that with a pencil and tried to get the other shoe to be similar.  Then I started painting the black lines and dots for the red stitches (MAKE SURE YOU HAVE LET THE SHOES DRY COMPLETELY BEFORE DOING EACH STEP.  I was impatient and tried moving too quickly and the colors would run)  then added the red stitches.  I ended up tracing around it all with a black sharpie.  DONE AND GOOD ENOUGH FOR FREE!
You could put some sort of protective coating on these but I don't know that I will.  You still have time to make yours for opening day so GET CRACKING!