Those little gumpaste baby shoes that go on the top of baby shower cakes can be a lot more time-consuming than they look.
It doesn’t help if you’ve never made any before, as I found out the hard way.
This is my advice about what to pay attention to so that you can experience an error-free process when you put the shoes together.
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First, start with a pattern.
There are plenty online, but I used a pair of my baby shoes to make one.
Aren’t they cute? I like the bells, I must have been fast and sneaky so my mother needed to hear where I was.
First thing…When you cut the patterns out, make sure that you remember to poke out the holes when the patterns are flat on the counter.
I, of course, did not, so I had to poke them out after I’d attached them to the soles.
When you attach the front of the shoe to the sole, the toe part can get flattened out.
I’ve seen a lot of gumpaste baby shoes that are just flat like that, but I wanted them to be rounder.
I thought that when I added the trim on the bottom it would be fuller, but after I’d added the toe part and the trim it still looked too flat.
Sooooo… I peeled off the ridged toe part and added a roll of gumpaste to fill in the toe area and round it out.
Then I re-covered the toe with flat white, since I liked that better than the ridged.
Because I’d already added the strip at the base of the shoe, it made it more difficult than it needed to be. So remember to add something to fill out the toe before covering it.
Paint the little eyelets with silver…
And add the laces.
But wait! Notice how I did the laces?
Yes, I did them wrong, the same way I always lace up new shoes the wrong way and have to take them out and re-do them.
At least I’m consistent.
So make sure that you lace them up the right way to begin with unless you enjoy removing and replacing tiny strips of gumpaste into little holes.
Those are the things that I screwed up on these, so I thought I’d put the warning out there for those issues.
