Imagine walking up a winding staircase lit with shimmering tealights, to be greeted at its top by a glittering tree decorated with shoes! That was the sight that met me when I attended the Rainbow Club 'Colour, Cocktails and Catherine Wheels' event in the beautiful Square club in Clifton on Tuesday. I went with my friend and fellow blogger Tara from The Style Rawr and it was lovely to see lots of friendly faces there from across the blogosphere!
The event was hosted by Octane PR on behalf of Rainbow Club shoes, who are a bespoke shoe brand providing specially dyed shoes for any occasion. Be it bridal, formal, prom or just to match a particular outfit, the company has a large selection of shoes which are then custom dyed to your own specification. From heels to flats and sandals to courts, there is a really extensive range and they are very reasonably priced too.
We began the evening with some cocktails and settled down on the terrace underneath the patio heaters; luckily it wasn't raining! We were given a challenge to design our own shoes on the blank block shoes provided; there were all kinds of embellishments from buttons to glitter as well as braiding, cord and feathers! We had to choose the colour dye we wanted our shoes to be and could then set about customising them!
I hadn't really thought about what I wanted to do to the shoes but I knew that I wanted to make a shoe I would wear myself. In this vein, I chose navy for the dye colour; I had thought about maybe something brighter but in the end I decided to keep it simple. I went for a toe cap style, which was really hard to achieve as the dye did bleed into the area surrounding the edge of the toe cap but I was able to cover this with some cord. I used a flat shoe first to practise on so I could get an idea of how the toe cap would work and then I moved on to a block heeled court I had picked for my actual challenge shoe.
In terms of embellishments, I kept it very simple again and decorated the shoe using a single gemstone and some gold braid to edge off the toe cap. I also dyed the heel of the court shoe navy and used some braid to wrap around the heel. I secured it with a gemstone on the back of the heel to hide the join of the braid.
I had so much fun making the shoes, and it was great to compare styles at the end of the event; the winning style scooped a £100 Harvey Nichols gift card and it was great to see the effort that everyone had gone to in designing their own shoes. We were even allowed to keep our shoes and I took both mine home to put on the mantelpiece or use as a bookend! I was quite proud of the way they looked even though it was quite difficult to achieve!
After an hour or so making our shoes we were all hungry, but thankfully yummy barbequed burgers and bowls of apple crumble meant that we weren't feeling peckish for long!
If you would like to know more about Rainbow Club shoes, check out their website here.
Thank you Octane PR for an amazing event!
XO Amie
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