How to Make DIY The Very Hungry Caterpillar Shoes Tutorial

If you’re a preschool or kinder teacher and love to dress in the fashion of what you are teaching in class then you will be a big fan of some of our children’s book “fashion” posts! (like our Pete the Cat T-shirt Tutorial!)

I actually made a The Very Hungry Caterpillar pair of shoes that I personally like better than this pair but I’ll be posting that later next week for you! Whenever I find cheap white shoes on clearance for $5 or less I buy several pairs in my size so that I can have fun decorating them!

These white shoes only set me back $3! These are the type of canvas shoes I normally buy for designing but I wanted to try a smoother shoe.

So you’ll need a pair of white shoes (the ones I bought this time are pleather rubber type – not the canvas shoes), a pack of Tulip Fabric Markers, and a pack of Sharpie Fabric Markers. (I DID use both brands of fabric markers which I’ll explain later.)

BEFORE I touched my shoes with any of the fabric markers I wrote down what I wanted to do on a piece of paper so I could figure out what I was doing.

Each shoe had different designs on them. For one shoe I used the seam in the back of the shoe to create a sun. Easy peasy! I just colored it all yellow and added a few stripes and a smiley face with the orange fabric marker.

Since the shoe is NOT fabric the colors kind of melt together better like the watercolor Eric Carle look BUT it does take a while to dry on the shoe so be careful not to immediately smudge it!

On the same shoe as the sun I drew a brown line of “dirt” around the entire shoe making the “dirt” higher on the top toe part.

To make the pattern you see above I lightly just pressed my finger onto the wet marker and dabbed it around to give it a more textured dirt look.

Once the brown “dirt” had dried I got to work on the Hungry Caterpillar itself. I started out using the darkest green Tulip Fabric Marker and drew a large elongated oval then on each side drew smaller and smaller ovals.

I then outlined the green ovals with the Sharpie Fabric Marker to give it a bolder green color. You can see above the various green colors together makes it look more watercolored than just one marker color. Then it’s easy to add on a red circle for the head, eyes, antennae and feet.

I also drew a green leaf on the side with the same idea of using 2 different brands of green fabric markers to outline and color it. I used the red and green fabric markers and colored the seams of the shoes I had purchased so that the shoes weren’t SO white.

For the other shoe I drew fruit down the sides of the shoe. I started by actually drawing the circle which stayed white in the middle and then drew the rest of the fruit around it and colored it in.

On the toe I *tried* to draw the butterfly from The Very Hungry Caterpillar. It’s ok for the kids. I basically used similar colors to the butterfly in the book and just drew thick lines off of the butterfly body.

I used the Sharpie fabric markers for the bolder part of the wings and the Tulip fabric marker for the softer colors of the wings.

Then I added the red and green coloring on the seams of that shoe as well. The other pair of The Very Hungry Caterpillar shoes that I designed (that I’ll post next week) are FULL of bright colors but if you like a lighter very white design this is great for you!

I created them while we were watching TV one night! You can brush or spray some waterproof mod podge over the colors to help seal them. I’m not sure how well it will hold up with heavy rain or wear so that’s up to you on when you want to wear them!