So my first order of business for starting my She-Ra cosplay was to make boot covers. I actually thought this would be a simple task consisting of 1) some spandex fabric 2) making 2 pieces and sewing it in a boot shape 3) wearing it like a sock over an old pair of high boots. Well, apparently finding gold spandex fabric is much harder than I thought. Had I known that, I would have ordered some through
Spandex World!
So due to my bad planning, I was left with some non stretch pleather-ish gold fabric from JoAnnes. My first task was figuring out how the heck I was going to cover a boot. After some thought over how hot it might be or how comfortable my feet would be, I decided to use an old and very worn in pair of comfortable Nine West pumps and cover those with fabric instead. I decided to do this in 4 pieces – 2 for the foot portion and 2 for the shaft.
First I used some leftover fabric and attempted to outline the shape of the left and right side of the shoe. I used this stencil to then cut the gold fabric, leaving extra allowance around the edges for sewing.
*Extra challenge points for trying to trace this while wearing the shoes yourself. It would have definitely helped if I could get someone to help me do this since I was the one wearing the shoes!
Next, I created the shapes for the boot shaft. If you are just retracing the right/left sides, make sure you flip everything and not just trace the exact shape!
I then sewed the foot parts together, sewed the shaft part together and then sewed both of those together, aligning the middle seam when doing this. At this point, I lightly fitted these over the pumps just to make sure they fit ok. You will basically end up with a shape like this.
*Note, you can definitely just make this 2 pieces per boot if you want. I just made it 4 because I was trying to prevent too much wrinkling. If you have stretchy fabric, I definitely think you can just use two pieces of fabric.
Once you know everything fits over your shoe ok, add a zipper to the back. It’s best to make this low enough to ensure you don’t have problems putting the boot on. Of course, if you have stretchy fabric, this is less of an issue.
I decided to put masking tape over the entire base of the shoe in case I wanted to use the shoes again. Then I would just have to peel off the tape instead of ripping everything off the soles. Once I was done sewing up the zipper, I then used my hot glue gun to glue the bottom pieces of fabric to the bottom of the shoe. Here is my shoe w/the tape and then the results of gluing all the fabric to the bottom. I pretty much had to glue this while wearing the boot to ensure a tight fit around my foot.
Once that was done, I finished the seams on the top of the shaft. I did this last to make sure everything was even length while wearing the boot. AND…. here is the finished product!
