Lilacs & Birch: Refashioned Tom's! (Psst, it's a tutorial)

My Tom's are among my favorite shoes. They are the comfiest things ever and every pair bought brings a new pair of shoes to a child in need. I love the shoes, I love the charity, but as a part-time grocery store cake decorator, I don't love their price tag :( And, as I'm sure many people know, their minimalist design and dedication to natural materials means that the canvas doesn't last as long as the other shoes in our wardrobes, so to add another summer to their life (and a few dollars kept in my pocket) I have completely recovered them in new fabric! I took a slightly lazy approach to recovering these, so here's the tutorial on how I did it.

First, get together some supplies:

Old Tom's

Scissors

Sewing needle

Thread

New fabric

Fabric glue* (not pictured)

My first step was to take the Tom's label off so I can put them over the new fabric and keep them looking authentic.

Next, I cut a square of fabric bigger than I needed and started folding the edges under and pinning it into place to get the shape of the shoe.

I cut a slit near the middle to keep the v shape, since they'd lose their stretch if I had covered over it. For the upper piece, I left the bottom edge raw since I was going to put the lower panel of fabric over it.

Keeping all of my folds in place, I took the fabric off the shoe, trimmed any excess fabric, and started stitching around the borders. I hand stitched them with a back stitch and doubled thread because I liked the look, but a sewing machine will make it that much easier :)

This is what all of my pieces looked like after I had pinned them into the right shapes. Two panels over the toe, and one long panel to cover the back. I made sure to make the lower toe panel so that it would overlap the raw edge of the upper panel, which also keeps the diagonal seam over the top (they look so real!)

The lazy part comes in with the fabric glue, because once I had all of my pieces stitched together, I just glued them to the shoe. I had originally tried to stitch the fabric to the shoes, but some parts of the fabric are so thick that I needed a thimble and I bent two sewing needles before using the glue method. By stitching the fabric pieces, we are creating the illusion that we worked really hard when we only used glue! Yay laziness!

Another small detail I did to keep their look was to make the lower toe panel a little bigger than needed over the toe so I could put the folds in the front.

Here's the contrast between the worn out shoe and the pretty shoe brought back to life by floral loveliness.

See how the diagonal stitch over the top makes it look almost like an original? (You are going to fool so many people!)

Here's the side view, which shows how I glued the heel panel under the Tom's tag on the side, another little detail that will keep your shoes looking like Tom's, rather than knock-offs.

And the last step is to glue the Tom's tag on the heel, let everything dry for about 24 hours, depending on the glue you used, and voila! Your Tom's are prettier than ever!