DIY bleached and studded converse

inspired by the awesome 'chlorine converse' at one of audrey kitchings wonderful online stores, lazy bones vintage, i decided to try customizing my old halloween converse, i purchased in the USA about 3 1/2 years ago. what you'll need is some bleach, a bucket and gloves.

ATTENTION: only bleach outside, it's going to smell really awful and just wear clothes that can be ruined in case you'll spill something!

STEP 1: remove the laces from your shoes, if you don't want them to be bleached, too.

STEP 2: fill the bleach into a big and clean bucket. put you shoes inside, you might add some bleach if they're not fully covered. 

IMPORTANT: come back from time to time to see how light your shoes already are, if they stay in the bleach too long, the fabric could be ruined. i didn't use strong bleach, so the process took a lot of time, but to make sure your shoes won't fall apart you should really check every 1/2 an hour.

STEP 3: take the shoes out of the bleach and wash them out with some clean water. after that put them into the washing machine, but be careful, there's still a lot of bleach in the fabric, so don't wash them with dark clothes!

after 24h in the bleach the colour of my shoes changed to a light orange, wich hadn't really been what i wanted. but i discovered a 'power colour remover' in a local supermarket (i really recommend using this instead of bleach to all the german readers! bleach does at least fail to fully remove the colour of converse shoes..) and instead of following the instructions i just used the whole package in a small amount of hot water and suddenly and very fast all the colour went out of my shoes. (i used about 3l of 60°C hot water with the whole package) i left them in the bucket for another 12 h and now they're just some kind of creamy white, like you can see on the right picture. i really love the purple seams, actually.

STEP 4: before putting your laces back into your shoes you can add the final touch by studding them first. you can use pyramid, cone, round.. studs, spikes, golden, silver, black, or colourful ones, in an even or more random pattern, depending on your shoe and whatever you like. 

i chose the random studs - random colours - random pattern option and i really like how the shoes turned out finally. i might add some spikes in the back and i recently discovered some star and skull studs that might look awesome, too.

well, the DIY project itself is awesome, i had so much fun and finally turned the ugliest pair of my converse into the most special and extraordinary one, that i'm going to wear a lot in the future!