The Shoes Heard Round The World. Or Something.

Many years ago...
I took a belly dancing class once a week, along with my mom and sister and a family friend. It was probably terribly good for us. Anyway...
As I was practicing turns in the living room one day I caught my toe on the carpet, thereby folding it under my foot. And quicker than you could blink I stepped on it, breaking my toe. It was pretty dreadful. This risky barefoot tradition (with the attendant way your feet get all grubby on the floor during class) remained in my mind as the peril of belly dancing.
Fast forward to a couple of years ago. I had recently quit my retail job and I was stoked to start expanding my online store. I had been tossing around the idea of dying shoes for a while so I was on the prowl for cotton canvas shoe blanks that could be experimented with. I remembered my previous experiences with belly dancing class and decided that some canvas ballet slippers would probably be the perfect medium, with the added bonus of having an obvious market. Breaking toes is just so outré.
So I went online and bought some canvas slippers from Discount Dance Supply...
Which reminded me of all the pretty ballet shoes there are in the world...
Which reminded me of how much I wanted to dance again...
And the rest is history.

PS: I did dye those slippers! But then I discovered that the dye makes the leather soles go all crunchy and cardboardy... and I really hate lumpy soles anyway, so...
Yeah, I never actually put any of them in my shop.
But here they are, anyway, the shoes that started this whole crazy thing:

FLASHY.

Why Ballet?

Why did I decide to take ballet? Again? Hmm. Let's see. I love dancing, so I just really wanted to take some form of dance class. I have been looking pensively at studio web sites for the last six years or so (when I moved away from my suburban home and my community center belly dance class). I tried a few times to convince my husband (for whom, bless his heart, physical coordination is an afterthought) to take tango lessons but that was obviously not ever going to happen. I attempted to take a belly dance class with a friend of mine a couple of years back, but when we got to the studio the teacher and students were, and I am not kidding here, toking up on a bong in the classroom between sessions. I mean WHAT. There is another studio in my immediate area that does belly dance classes, but the instructor is an old nemesis of mine from back when I worked in retail. Woman is obnoxious. So I tried to find any kind of dance class at a community center or something... but there wasn't anything available for adults.
And then I went online and saw pretty ballet shoes.
Again.
It is my fatal flaw. I first decided I had to take ballet years ago when I ran across Gaynor Minden's website. I don't even know how I landed there. I just did. And then it was all photos of pointe shoes and pink ribbons and the logic center in my brain just turned right the heck off. This time I am pretty sure it was looking at the product photo for these Grishko technique shoes. I just died a little inside.
My natural dancing style is very unrefined. Far more Isadora Duncan than Darcy Bussell. I am particularly fond of dancing around to Florence and the Machine right now. In a sort of wild modern-slash-ballet hybrid. It's pretty ridiculous.