Major shoe-shopping crisis: my wedding shoes!

Major shoe-shopping crisis: my wedding shoes!

• 3.24.2011

I love shoes. And I want to love my wedding, also, so my shoes are pretty important to me. I have been wanting yellow satin formal pumps, with a little bit of a retro twist, to go with my dress which is as of yet not cut out or even fully designed. But I was shopping for purple satin shoes for my bridesmaids (who will be wearing pale grey), and I thought it would be ideal if my shoes matched theirs but were a different color. The six of us had been going back and forth on quite a few shoe options, none of which were perfect. So when I found these Luichiny heels on 6pm.com, which at the time were only $26.99 plus $5 shipping!, I asked my bridesmaids to buy them.

They looked pretty cute, and seemed the perfect color. Plus, $32 for wedding shoes? Pretty good.


For me, I ordered them in yellow, and I also paid the $26.99--looks like the price has gone up since last week! Funny. Anyway, here they are:

I thought the big roses looked a little tacky in the bright yellow, and some of the comments warned they were more orange-ey yellow than just yellow, which I wanted. I ordered them anyway. I thought about taking off the roses and putting some cute yellow and white striped ribbon bows, or something, or cute shoe clips?

They came. They are ugly. I hate them.

They are an orange-ey yellow, which in the super shiny cheap satin is not nice. The rose is terrible, and I have a hard time visualizing what they'd look like without it, although it does look easy to remove and replace with something cuter.

I worried about what the other shoes were like--would I hate my five bridedsmaids' shoes, also?? They showed up in the mail around the same time, and yesterday my friend and I went to lunch and she brought hers with her: they are awesome!! In purple they are so pretty! It is the perfect purple, and it even looks kinda classy despite the huge flower! I am so excited to see it on everyone. So that's good.

But mine--my first thought was to send them back. However 6pm has a pretty crappy return policy, as a discount site, and from all the online shoe-shopping I've done in the past few days, I returned no results of possible shoes that I really liked. Is there some way I could transform them...???  I'll walk you through my thought process.

The perfect shoe is basically this Nina pump in yellow (it doesn't come in yellow).

The shoe Nina does make in yellow that is an option, although not as cute, is this one:

I don't really like that yellow that much, either, although it's much better than the one I have.  And it's relatively spendy, although if you don't splurge on wedding shoes, when will you?  Still, I'm not about to go buy it immediately.

The other shoe that is okay, but not great, from Nina, is this one:

The satin ribbon looks sort of tacky in the yellow.  I guess I could replace it... eh, I dunno.

Now, $100 for Ninas is more than I wanted to pay, but I would be willing to if they were perfect (they're not).  Even if I raise the bar even more, I can't find the perfect shoe... for example, here are my choices at BHLDN...

These (cute but very orange/mustard-ey and closed-toed, which I don't really want), for like $320.  They are almost the same color as the ones I ordered and don't like, although the fact that Anthro has some this color makes me like it more.  Maybe it's not too tacky after all?  Although it's also the sheen of mine--these are probably silk satin, and mine are cheap weave poly!

Or maybe something like these, also super spendy--these give me an idea for an alteration I could make to the tacky Luichiny ones I have--

Anyway.  I have tried all kinds of shoe websites--Amazon, Zappos, Payless, Target, AMI Clubwear, GoJane, Victoria's Secret, Newport News, Nordstrom... places that might have formalwear shoes in bright colors.  To no avail.  I found these acceptable Nine West ones at Zappos for $59:

But they're leather, not satin, and would definitely need some cute shoe clips.  That's another idea I got from Anthro's BHLDN site: shoe clips, something in this vein:

Could I add something like that to my tacky yellow shoes, in a contrast color?  Could I cut apart the rose and make a self-fabric interfaced bow?  Would my original plan of white/yellow striped ribbon bows work?

The other idea I had was dying shoes, like Payless used to have with their Dyeables line.  They have something similar now but no bright yellow, and none of them are the perfect shape anyway.  So what if I did it myself?  Or if I used yellow fabric spray paint?  I imagine I could find a good style of shoe in white, and spray paint or dye it.  It's sort of a risky experiment, though, so I'd want to do it on a cheap shoe.  Would it look professional?

I don't know what to do.  This whole thing has made me grumpy!!  I figured if there was anyone who could help me, it'd be you readers, you creative and talented craftsladies.  I have a few ideas, but I'm sure you all can think up something I haven't yet.

Please!!  What should I do?!!?!?!?!