Zebra Print Gum Paste High Heel

Okay, okay.  So first of all, I apologize for being a blogging slacker for the last month.  I have a partially valid excuse, I promise.

In case you haven't heard, this past week I traveled to Austin, TX to participate in the Capital Confectioners Day of Sharing as the headlining demonstrator(!) and to teach my 2 day gum paste stiletto class.  I know.  I was really stoked about it.  

However, this required a lot of preparation.  We'll address a lot of this in some subsequent posts, but one of my orders of business was to figure out what I was going to demo!  Since it was a jungle theme, I opted to center my demo around animal prints.  I decided that I would demo a zebra print on a shoe, because how cool would that be!

So I just had to come up with a new shoe design and figure out how to do zebra print.  No problem, right?

Well, you know me, I like to make everything difficult.  So first I developed a new heel idea.

Okay, so I 'cheated' and made it out of styrofoam.  Actually I made 2, one for the practice shoe and one to take on the road with me.  The heels were then wrapped in gum paste and painted to look like wood.  Now, if I wanted to make this fully edible, I would create a mold from a styrofoam form and then cast it in chocolate and proceed as normal.

Here's an up close shot of the painting process.  I couldn't paint the whole heel at my demo so I brought it pre-made.  However, I did demo the painting technique on a flat piece of gum paste so people could see how I did it.

I did some experimenting to perfect the zebra technique:

The second one is a little more fun. :)

Aren't the studs fun?  I made my own mold for those using a rhinestone I found in the scrapbooking section at Michael's and Amazing Mold Putty.  And I love the patent leather look of the red edging on the toe piece.  I achieved that look by painting it with confectioners glaze to give it a high shine.

The flower is gum paste with plastic stamen.  

I did the label with an oval cutter and then trimmed the edge with my favorite tool, the PME Design Wheeler using the zig zag attachment.  That's also how I do my stitching....

Ah, shoe love!  Now for the Austin posts!