Weddingbee Blog

I know, I know, it’s been a while since I’ve written about shoes. I sort of left you all hanging after describing just how obsessed with shoes I am, and then my dilemma about the perfect shoes that weren’t.

You all were so amazingly helpful in convincing me to not wear shoes that were too big and possibly ruining them by changing their color. And you guys sent me some amazing shoe possibilities too, which I really appreciated!

After my last post, I continued my hunt for the perfect shoes, looking into some of the ones the hive sent me, and also looking at some more expensive designer shoes.

In the meantime, my mom emailed me this funny story, about just how early my shoe obsession began:

“When you were about 18 months old, you and your dad went with me to shop for shoes. You were in your stroller and you were fascinated with all the shoes. After we crisscrossed the mall, going to several shoe stores, we looked down and you were holding a bright pink high heeled pump. After checking, we determined that the pump wasn’t sold in that store. We backtracked until we finally found the right store. Quietly, we replaced the shoe on the rack and quickly exited the store. Thus, your obsession with shoes began and has grown over the past 25 years.”

See? Even as a baby, I loved awesome heels!

So, I continued on with my search for the most perfect, jaw-dropping, amazing, “OMG I’ve never seen such unique shoes” in purple.

Here’s a look at some of my considerations, that were close, but not quite perfect, for one reason or another.

Brian Atwood heels: loved the color, but they were not available in my size. They would have been alright, but not “wow”, if I could have had shoe clips made to match my jewelry:
Nina heels that were pretty, but not quite right:
Giuseppe Zanotti shoes, no longer available in the three tone purple color (but I have seen them available in white that could be dyed):

I liked these Loubs, but could only find fake versions of them online, and I didn’t want to spend a couple hundred dollars on something that wasn’t even legit!
Same with these other Christian Louboutin shoes: I could only find the knock offs, and also, the metallic lilac color probably was too silver to go with my gold dress anyway:
I liked these Manolos alright, but a lot of brides have worn them already, and again, only fakes were available in purple:

These Viktor & Rolf shoes were pretty awesome, but not purple. Nor could I find them available anywhere:
These Loubs posted by Miss Damask on the boards were getting closer to the “OMG WOW” look I was going for… but again, they were not available, and not 100% perfect. But close, so very close—if only I was a feathers kind of girl!

I liked the romantic feel to these Valentino heels, but they weren’t purple, and $1250 was a bit steep:
And I almost loved these, but I’m not sure patent leather was right for my taffeta dress… plus there’s that pesky availability and price issue.
So after obsessively looking online for about another hundred hours, dreaming about running after the perfect shoes but never catching them, and pretty much just pulling out my hair, it occurred to me: why not just DIY my own shoes?

That had been my original idea, to DIY shoes after the ones I ended up getting (the ones that turned out not purple and too big). So why not move ahead with the DIY—after all, I’ve DIYed almost everything else for our wedding!

So I ended up designing my own shoes (in Photoshop, of course!), using one of the shoes in this post as my inspiration! Can you guess which ones?

Let me give you a hint… we bought a LOT of purple ribbon from an amazing 4 story fabric store in San Francisco.