Father’s Day DIY Gift!

Here’s to all the dads!

There’s no one like them!

So to honor them on their day, I make one of my favorite craft gifts!

It’s extra fun because I always keep it a secret 😉

About a week before I send a private message to all the moms asking them to send in one or a pair of daddy’s shoes that they won’t notice are missing and that they won’t mind if I paint with.

Then the kids get to plot with mom and sneak in daddy’s shoes 😄

I start by painting the bottom of the shoe – I usually use brown but you can do any color.

Carefully press the shoe down on a large piece of paper and make sure to press down every part of the shoe – I usually carefully roll the shoe a little side to side, around the edges of the heel, then roll the shoe off the paper from the toe getting the tip that’s usually curled up.

It took me a lot of practice to perfect my skillz 😉 have lots of extra paper on hand

Make sure to let that dry all the way before moving on to the next part!

Next, paint the corresponding foot (left or right to match the shoe) of the kiddo in your color of choice and carefully put the footprint inside the shoe print (a lot of shoes have a nice open space that works, although I’ve also done one that didn’t and I just had to use A LOT of paint on the kiddo’s foot to make a footprint that you could see clearly)

If you want to see my tips for the perfect footprint perfected through years of trial and error, click here!

Let that dry before moving on too!

In the meantime, you can get the super cute pictures taken!

Here are some of my beautiful friends over the years modeling daddy’s shoes 😍😍😍😍

The kids LOVED taking pictures in daddy’s shoes! It was often hard to keep them from talking about it at home lol

I include the best picture in the craft along with a cute border I pieced together and a poem I wrote – one for the boys and one for the girls:

I also take videos of them trying to walk in daddy’s shoes and send them out on Father’s Day 🥰

Once the footprint is dry I cut out the poem/picture and paste it onto the footprint paper then glue the whole thing to a large piece of construction paper to create a color border.

I recommend placing a bunch of books on top while they dry so they dry flat 👍

I’ve done these many different ways over the years – usually, it just depended on whether or not daddy’s shoe size was small enough to fit on the page and still leave room for the picture 😄

I’ve recently also done one for two siblings where I just did the prints and a smaller cut out of the poem so it could fit into a picture frame. For this one, after the prints were dry I cut them out completely and glued them onto some cute scrapbook paper.