Simple Light-Up Shoe Planter

You have a green thumb? Well I have a green toe! If you are like me, you go through shoes rather quickly. I have always felt slightly guilty about how quickly I either grow out of new shoes or rough them up beyond wear. So as a environmentally friendly way to use these unused shoes, I have devised a way to prolong their purpose. This solution of course is turning them into the homes of your future plants. With a little bit of extra creativity and effort, I was able to turn my bland, unused shoes into a new light-up planter.

For this project, you will need:

- An Old Shoe

- Plant of Your Choice

- Soap + Water

- X-Acto Knife/Sharp Cutting Tool

-Hot Glue Gun

-Scissors

-Small Piece of Plastic or Carboard (Cardboard Preferably)

-LED Lights

Your first step will be to clean up the shoe that you are planning to use in this project. Cleaning the shoe is as simple as letting the shoe soak in a container of hot water and soap. I personally used dish soap, which worked perfectly fine. Make sure to get all parts of the shoe cleaned. The cleaner the shoe, the more presentable it will look. After you are done washing the shoe, ring as much water as yo can that the shoe might of soaked up. Then let it dry out in the sun until it is completely dry.

Once your shoe is dry, examine your shoe to find any lose threads or peeling in the rubber or fabric. As you can see in my pictures, the water cause a little bit of the rubber to come loose. To fix this, I simply used hot glue to reattach the rubber to the fabric. I also went around with my pair of scissors to cut any loose threads that I preferred to be removed.

Now that your shoe is completely cleaned and prepped, you can now move onto creating a divider within the shoe. This divider will separate the soil and plant that will be placed inside the hole of the shoe, and the toe section of the shoe. This latter part of the shoe will be the hidden home to the battery and cables that will power and hook up the LED lights.

For this part of the job, I simply used my X-Acto. Cutting a shoe is much more difficult than it may seem, so I highly recommend using an X-Acto knife or some other sharp object that will be able to make clean and precise cuts. Remember to also protect yourself first. If you feel as though you need help cutting, please ask for someone for assistance.

We are almost done. It is time to start setting up the LED lights. This part of the project is optional, but I do extremely recommend following. The final product looks very nice with the lights attached. (If you lack these supplies at home, you can find an LED set for extremely cheap on Amazon). I simply used a small battery pack as my power supply and a strip of LED lights that are operated by remote. After attaching the battery pack to the LED strip, you can slide the battery pack and wires inside of the front compartment that we made in the last step.

After doing so, measure the approximate length you need in order for the lights to wrap all around the shoe. With most LED strips you can cut along dotted lines to make them shorter. Then, you want to apply the lights to the shoe. I personally brought out my hot glue gun again and the job went worked perfectly. Here, you may want assistance from someone in holding the shoe in place as you apply the lights.

Finally, you can now add your plant of choice into the main hole of the shoe. I chose to use a jalapeño plant, which I think looks great. The shoe and divider create a well compact area that all plants need in order to survive. This project was very fun and simple and can be achieved within a couple hours of work. I encourage you to consider doing this project with friends or family with Earth Day coming up!