"Carnival is a butterfly of winter, whose last mad flight of Mardi Gras forever ends his glory. Another season is the glory of another butterfly, and the tattered, scattered fragments of rainbow wings are in turn the record of his day."
~ Perry Young
The butterfly garden has a couple of sources of inspiration, mainly these wearable-art-shoes by etsy seller MerloDesigns: Butterfly Garden Nature High Heel Pumps and Nature Forest Wedge Heels, and also the Butterfly Walk at the City Park botanical gardens.
Generally speaking, having butterflies on shoes also appeals to me because of the famous quote above and the neon butterfly puppets in the Muses parade.
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| The Butterfly Garden shoe after the first few (of many) rounds of glittering (Gold Recollections on the wedge, a few difference shades of Martha Stewart greens on the exterior). It always takes patience to get the glitter on right, but this shoe took a lot of extra drying time steps because I wanted the greens a little mottled. |
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| Ultimately about 5-6 different shades of green went onto this shoe to give it a dappled, naturalistic effect (and because I didn't really have enough of any one shade of green to cover the whole shoe). I went for more yellow greens for the inside of the shoe to contrast the brighter exterior shoe greens. I applied the puff paint on really thick on the "Muses" on this shoe, which is risky because it's more prone to smudging, but here it yielded a great 3D effect. |
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| The butterflies I've had in my craft stash for a long time. I tried not to overload the shoe with butterflies, so did a base of flowers and vines, then I picked specific flowers for them to perch on. The pink and purple flowers were from a bag of embellishments that was crazy on sale at Michael's (I want to say it was originally a kit for decorating flip flops). There were some daisies in there, but I didn't think they really fit. I added some crystal bead centers to most of the flowers and added glitter to the vines so there'd be a little extra shimmer. Looking back I could have given the petals glitter edges if I'd had more time. The butterflies were already glittered. |
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| I added some garden maze designs to the bottom of the shoe in a slightly yellow-er green, so they'd be subtle. I sort of had the French garden labyrinths in mind, though I can admit they have a pretty crop-circle-y vibe going as well. |
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| One the heel, I added a little M in the style of initials carved in a tree with brown glitter (Martha Stewart in "Brownstone"). This picture also shows the pretty little pebble border. We got a little bag of decorative pebbles to try out as a potential vase filler for my wedding. We ultimately scraped the idea, leaving me with some beautiful little pebbles in my craft supply stash. I was inspired by the pebble borders on this gorgeous artsy shoe. |
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| This is a shot with the flash on to show the different shades of green a little more clearly |
I don't have this shoe's mate, so it won't be a straight up repeat like some of my others, but I think I'll probably do some more shoes in this vein, because I like the final shoe so much and always have tons of butterflies and fake flowers on hand (and plenty of leftover pebbles still). Maybe more Botanical Garden themed shoes, like something inspired by the Lily Pond or the Rose Beds or the Zen Garden? I think a trip to the Botanical Gardens is definitely in order when it's warm out...
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