Part One




Hi everybody! Today I will be taking all of you through one of a two-part tutorial on what to do when you have a pair of cheap-ass boots in your cupboard that you only wore once because they made you feel too “Pretty Woman”. You make them fabulous, that’s what you do!

I actually don’t like knee-length boots. Some girls can pull them off, but others, well, it’s an edge look, let’s put it that way. Ankle boots are much easier to work with!

So here are the steps I took with the corresponding pictures displayed at the top of the post.

Step One: Get all your equipment together. For today’s tutorial, what you’ll need is a little sewing kit, a pair of scissors, and a nasty, cheapo pair of hooker boots. Mine are from Ice and I washed the sole before the tutorial because I knew I’d be handling them a lot and didn’t want to handle dirty shoes. I bought them when they were having a storewide 50% off sale and they ended up costing me $15, but I only wore them once to a little restaurant in Garden City that gave me violent food poisoning and so the associated memories with those boots haven’t been too good. As well as these, if you already have one, I really recommend a sewing machine. It is extremely tough work to do this with a needle and thread, though it is completely doable!

Step Two: Mark out how short you want the boots to be (maybe compare them against an existing pair of ankle boots) and cut off the excess. This next part is very important to take note of: leave at least an inch more than you need. I left about a centimetre more. This was a pain in the ass. As my mother always tells me, “Od vise glave ne boli” which roughly translates to “An excessive amount of head (as in the head at the top of your body) doesn’t hurt (i.e. “A hole in the head hurts!”)”. Moral of the story: leave an inch more than you need. Also this is common sense a bit but if your boot has a zip, pull it all the way down. If it’s at the top when you chop your boot up, you’re basically stuffed.

Step Three: Fold down the edges into roughly the shape you want. I wanted sort of a cowboy-ish shape to the top, so the front and back dipped down a bit and the sides were more rounded arches. I used bobby pins from my kit to hold it down. I then sewed the edge roughly into place just to keep it from moving while I worked on the sewing machine. If you don’t have a sewing machine, you’re gonna have to do this by hand and then go over it again by hand, but it’s not recommended unless you’ve got a thimble or you’re wearing thick gardening gloves. The material is pretty thick so by the end of the project, my fingers were throbbing!

Step Four: Zip up the zip carefully just before you’ve finished sewing to the place where you want it to sit on the final copy. Fold it over carefully and sew it down. You’ll want to have the zip up while you do this. I had the zip down on one of the boots, roughly lined it up myself, and now one side is a bit taller than the other by about half a centimetre. I learned my lesson there!

Step Five: Using the lint brush, get rid of all the fluff and dust on your cheapo boots and then wash your hands. By this stage, your cheapo boots should have left your fingers stained and your hands will stink like cheapo boot chemicals, so do this step thoroughly! Then rinse and repeat if your hands still stink. If you’ve done the sewing by hand, your hands will be too throbbing to notice if you’re washing the skin off them so pay close attention.

Step Six: There is no step six, there are your new ankle boots!

Stay tuned for tomorrow where we’ll be moving on to Part 2 of this tutorial.

4 Comments

  1. Wow, what a great idea! I agree with your thoughts on knee-high boots – I own two pairs but I am short and my legs aren’t terribly thin so they don’t look great on me and I never wear them. Maybe I will give this a go since I love ankle boots!

    • Demi

      Better than leaving them lying around doing nothing, right? Let them earn a place in your cupboard instead (and post pictures if/when you decide to make the chop ;) )!

    • Demi

      You’ll love the next one too, I promise! ;)

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