How to Make Elephant Shoes

Dec 10

Written By Amber

Here is a tutorial on how to transform an ordinary pair of shoes into something a bit more interesting: elephant shoes! No, not shoes for you pet elephant. These are shoes strictly for humans. But if your pet elephant happens to have a pair of ordinary shoes, you can use the same methods to transform those shoes too. Although, your pet elephant may prefer to have a person as decoration on his shoes.

1. Make Your Design. You can make an elephant like I made, or you can make an elephant that looks completely different, or you don't even have to stick with an elephant. A cat, bear or any animal you can imagine will work. Just make sure the design is simple enough to be recreated in felt. Draw your design on a piece of paper, making it a size that will fit on the front of your shoes.

2. Cut your design out.

I cut the ears off the elephants head because I will cut out separate pieces of felt for the ears and the head. This gives the final elephant a more layered and dynamic look.

3. Trace your animal onto felt.

Two heads, four ears! Enough for each shoe to have a full elephant head.

4. Cut out the elephant head pieces from the felt.

I used two shades of gray for my elephant so their faces and ears are different. Also, there is no reason to stick with gray if you do not want too. I think gray and blue look good together so I decided to go with a traditional colored elephant. But an elephant of pink, blue, green or any color will be just as pretty!

5. If you want to do any sort of layering on your design, cut out those pieces.

I wanted my elephant to have rosy ears. It gives the shoes an extra pop of color. For this part, I cut out small circles and trimmed them down if I needed too until I thought they looked like a good size and shape for my elephant's ears.

6. Sew on the little pieces!

Sew on the inner ears (or any sort of felt layering you are doing for your design.). Also, sew on the buttons. The buttons are your animal's eyes. You can use googly eyes for this too. Or you can sew on round pieces of felt too. I like the button eye look because it reminds me of old fashioned stuffed-animals.

7. Sew your elephant onto your shoes!

Figure out where exactly on the shoes you want the elephant faces. First you will be sewing on the ears, so after you figure out where you want the elephant, pin on the ears and sew them on.