9-17 Larry's New Project

Painting Shoes

I woke up this morning feeling doggy and I didn't want to go to the gym or the lake. We hung around the house all day, didn't do much of anything. During the year when we go square dancing some of the dances are red, white and blue. We have outfits and hats to wear to the dances but I don't have any red, white and blue shoes. Larry has been thinking about painting a pair of my off white shoes that I don't often wear. He did some research on painting shoes and found a Angelus Leather Paints that gets high reviews. You can get them in different colors. He ordered a bottle of red, white and blue. They arrived at the house yesterday. Larry decided if we were going to hang around the house he would start this new project. The first thing he did was play with what type of design he wanted on the shoe. He took tape and taped off where he was going to put the blue. Then he taped off how he was going to stripe the shoe. Once he decided on how to paint the shoe he began the painting process. The first step to the process was to prep the shoes. He removed the shine from the shoes by sanding it off. He first tried steel wool but it was messy and was taking a long time. He moved to a fine sanding sponge, this worked better. After sanding the shoes he cleaned them with lacquer thinner. The next step was applying the white paint. He put five coats of paint on each shoe, he waited a bit in between each coat and they came out excellent. Now he's waiting for the white to fully cure and then he will start on one of the other colors.

Designing how to paint the shoes

Sanding the shine off the shoe

Cleaning the shoe with lacquer thinner

Painting the shoe white

The beginning color (off white) of shoe

The finished color (white)

In the afternoon I slow cooked the chicken I had in the refrigerator. The other day when we went shopping we thought we picked up a 12 pack of diet root beer but we had picked up diet creme soda by accident. I didn't know it until I opened a can and put it in the crock pot. I looked at the can and saw that it was diet creme soda and not diet root beer. I figured I might as well try the diet creme soda with the liquid smoke. The liquid smoke I used today was hickory instead of mesquite. The chicken came out ok but we like the diet root beer better than diet creme soda. For dinner we had a piece of chicken and boiled potatoes and gravy. I've made this before and we liked it. I've been talking about making a Chicken Black Bean Bake but always put it off. I had leftover chicken so I made the Chicken Black Bean Bake for tomorrow.

Streaming shows

During the day we streamed a couple of episodes of GizWiz and caught up on our YouTube videos. In the evening we streamed the first season of This American Life. It was a two seasons Showtime series taken from a radio show, that tells stories about real people and their life. Afterwards I worked on my book and played computer games.