Flower Embroidered Converse

For my upcycle project I wanted to take an old pair of converse shoes and embroider them with flowers in addition to some other shapes. I had never embroidered before so this project was a bit outside of my skillset and took a bit of trial and error to get good at. It took a lot of practice to figure out the right stitching pattern to use and by messing around with it I ended up doing a variation of a chain stitch. This project took roughly 7 hours to do and required a lot of concentration to make sure everything was right. I had originally wanted to stitch other flowers onto the shoe but ended up running out of time and went for a quality-over-quantity approach.

To trace an outline for where the flower would be I used a white colored pencil and lightly drew on the canvas. This ended up being helpful seeing where to stitch instead of doing it freehand. The dots at the top of the shoe were supposed to be another sunflower but I might add that at some point later.

The inner parts of the flower petals were by far the most time-consuming and took about 30 minutes each however they got easier once I better understood the most efficient pattern to stitch with. I stabbed my fingers with the sewing needle one too many times so that wasn’t the best but I got better pretty quickly.

Inside of the shoe where the back of the stitching was.