Custom • Golden Bows

This weeks custom shoes are these BEAUTIFULLLLL glowing golden heels! I honestly love how these turned out.

The customer got in touch wanting some dramatic golden heels for an upcoming wedding. The requirements were that they were a custom fit to accomodate a wider foot, that they have a rhinestone buckle, secure ankle strap, chunky heel, and were golden in some way.

I was too busy to document the whole process so I'll just go through a few of the details of this custom pair.

 

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First up was the fabric choice. The customer wanted something golden so I initially ordered this beautiful golden raw dupion silk with a lavender shadow. Once it arrived it was lovely, but not quite as metallic or shiny as we'd hoped. I stopped past an old classic, Spotlight, in a last ditch effort to find something and luckily they had a lovely textured golden lame. After consulting with the customer we decided to use both fabrics, as they had the same golden undertone.

 

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Next up was the buckle! A rhinestone buckle was specifically requested. I initially thought this was going to be one of the easiest parts of the order however I soon found it was one of the trickiest! After searching high and low online, I could find ZERO functional rhinestone shoe buckles. I ended up finding a pair in a local dance wear store - they were intended to be replacement buckles for ballroom dancing heels! The store had only two pairs of these buckles left, that had apparently been sitting there for years - definitely a lucky find!


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Then it was time to figure out this whole dramatic element! We decided to do a two toned kind of sculptural ribbon thing. While I am familiar with doing these types of sculptural features using leather, it was a bit of a challenge figuring out how to do it with fabrics. I ended up using two layers of iron on interfacing, with a piece of florists wire secured between them with a few lines of sewing. Once assembled, I tucked this into the sewn up ribbon tubes via a cut in the centre.


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Once that was done, they were all ironed - so beautiful and flat and shiny!. The fusible interfacing worked a treat and the ribbons were now sufficiently stiff, the fabric fully fused to the interfacing so it wouldn't move around, and the wire allowed for the ribbons to be accurately formed.

From here the rest of the order was smooth sailing and the regular kind of making processes. Check out some pics of the finished shoes below!


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Feel free to leave me a comment below, or get in touch for your own custom pair!

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