Making a gum paste shoe

Everyone loves shoes, right?  Well we all have to wear shoes so we may as well have them look good.  There are so many good places online to find tutorials on how to make shoes.  One of the best is at the pink cake box.  But I'll show you how I did mine.  First, make sure you have a couple of weeks to do these.  Here are the finished shoes.

 

First, make a form for your gumpaste to dry on.  The Pink Cake box used a real shoe they cut apart, but I wanted my shoe to be only 4 inches and they just don't make little girl shoes with 4 inch heels.  So I made my own, again following the advice of Cake Stories by Rose Sen.  Here is my shoe form:

I cut this shape out of foam board and taped it onto another piece of foam board.  I played with how it was cut to get the shape I wanted.  Then, using the template below, I cut the shoe shape out of a cereal box and hot glued it onto the foam board.

I don't eyeball anything, so I copied these templates from Cake Stories by Rose Sen into Microsoft Word and resized them to the size I needed. 

 

Once your shoe form is ready, cut a right and left shoe out of gum paste.  If you don't have an airbrush then use gum paste the color you want your shoe to be.  Lay them on the shoe form and let them dry for about a week.  To make the heel, I free formed the shape using the shoe form I had made to get the right height and shape.  I put a wooden skewer inside the heel to help with stability, but I don't know if it was necessary.  Let the heel dry for about a week also.

Ok, weeks up.  Well, I only waited 2 days because I am impatient and I thought it would be ok if I left the gumpaste on the shoe form. 

Next step, the back of the heel and the top of the shoe.  I've used salt dough in the past with great success to form gum paste so I made some dough.

Here's the recipe:

Salt Dough
1 cup water
2 cups flour
1 cup salt
3 tbsp oil

Mix this all together until it forms a dough. 

Not too hard.  I actually made 1/4 of the recipe and still had about 4 times too much.  You only need a little to hold up the shape of the shoe.  I put it in ziploc bags then shaped it to how I wanted the shoe to look.

 

Use the second template to cut out the top and back parts of the shoe.  Any details you want on the shoe like stitching around the edges or lines need to be done now.  Lay these over the salt dough bag and stick edges together with a little water.

 WAIT, STOP, PANIC.  Once I put these over the salt dough, I didn't think I could get the dough bags out without breaking the top of the shoe, and I was right, I couldn't get them out.  So I redid this step, but used tissue paper.  The shoe I was making was small enough that the tissue paper was enough to hold the gum paste up.  If you are making a larger shoe, you should be able to use the salt dough, I just had a very little space to pull all that dough out from.  Let the top and back of your shoe dry for another week.  Yes, I actually did let the top of my shoe dry for an entire week.  I also made 2 pair of shoes just in case something broke.  2 weeks is a long time to make shoes, but as it turned out, I didn't need them. 

To finish the shoe, I cut a circle inside of another circle, squished it into an oval and let that dry flat.  Then I airbrushed everything silver.  I stuck silver dragees around the oval and assembled the shoe.  I used tan fondant to make the lining inside the shoe, water and gum paste to stick the heel onto the shoe and royal icing to put the oval on the top.  Let it sit for a few more days to make sure the heel is good and dry.