the shoe story ...

ok ... here's the long version of the shoe story .... in may of 2007 ( wow, i am in my fourth calendar year of blogging, how 'bout that?) .... in may of 2007 i had on a pair of new clogs .... i am too cheap to buy birkenstocks ... so they were birky knock offs from payless shoes .. 12.99ish .... not bad ....( they've gone up in price now, i see) .... until i had a studio day in them ... and i spilled yellow paint ... on the nearly new shoes .... rendering them unwearalbe except for painting shoes ... so i decided to paint them all together ... and i blogged about it... and i had thesed totally groovy doodle shoes that i adored ... and have worn out .... the bottoms are nearly gone now ....

but i still wear them ... especially with jeans .... and in the winter ... but really, they are year round joys ....

so recently, i was cleaning my closet .... and ran across a pair of clogs ... again, not birkies ... but knock offs from walmart ... because yellow doodle clogs aren't always appropriate ... sometimes you want brown ....

ok ... huge diversion here ... i wanted to link up the "walmart clog" bit so you could get yourself some cheap knock off birky bits ... but WOW ... walmart online has some way groovy shoes ... way groovy ... like these ... but yikes they aren't cheap .... and then let's talk about these? they are one of my fave colors ... but really? not even i can quite imagine wearing them .... they do have them in other colors in case you aren't an orange girl ....

so ... back on track ... i was cleaning out my closet of some very worn out, soles nearly gone, brown suede (ish) birk knock offs from walmart ... and i put them in the goodwill bag ... little.e.beck.artist thought i was crazy ... paint them, mommy, paint them ... i told her i would, thinking i might not .... but then she was diligent in putting them into my kanuga bags .... and painted them ... orange ... because i'm an orange girl, as we've already established in this post .... and after THREE coats of paint to cover the dark brown, i wrote on them ...

one shoe has natasha bedingfield lyrics and the other has cheryl crowe .... love them .... if i had three feet, the third clog would be kelly clarkson, based on what i sang (loudly, poorly, and with total enthusiasm) while at kanuga .....

that left shoe has my family on the tongue/flap ... the other shoe has a sunshine ....

so ... as i've mentioned in previous kanuga-recap-posts .... i was there with my best pal al ... and my mom was there with her best pal taylor .....

i call taylor my other mother ... she's known me since before i was born (that's a long time no matter how you look at it ....) ... and taylor just loved that i paint my shoes .... and asked me to paint her shoes ... she brought me her oldish, black, heeled, not cheap knock off, clogs .... fancy shoes ... that she wanted me to paint ... but she wanted to still be able to wear them to "parties that i am supposed to look nice for but that i need to wear comfy shoes to" ... uh huh ... what am i supposed to do with that? no pressure .... so i bailed ... no can do ... and then that light bulb went off over t's head and she zipped off to fetch her old grody black sneakers .... and i painted them ... give them new life and ungrodiness (do you know how to say that word grow-dee .... it means kinda yucko) ... here they are in their new daisied splendor .....

well ... you can't paint shoes for other mother and not do them for first and foremost mother too! .... so here are the shoes i doodled up for my own mom .....

quite the shoe spectacle we all were .... and then ... because i'm just a contrarian at heart .... i wore two different shoes for the rest of the art week ... because i could ....

during one of the days, we had taylor visiting our percival studio .... and fr. jim came by from his own painting class .... we were his study break every day .... and taylor made fr. jim ooooh and aaaah over our shoes .... and then she said OH ... will you bless all our shoes ... not sure what made her think of that .... other than jim's a priest ... but i've never seen a priest and thought, oh, bless my shoes, please .... but .. there you go ... she asked and he said yes.... i'm not sure he even said yes ... he just went and prayed over them and bless these shoes and the feet that are in them ...

ok ... here's the short version of the shoe story ...

i painted three pairs of shoes while at kanuga ... my friend asked a priest to bless them.. he did .... now i wear non matching, holy shoes .....amen