Rydia Boots

 
Oh boy.  Rydia's boots are pretty crazy.  Crazy and gorgeous.  This portion of her outfit took a bit of research to try and pull off.  I spent several hours browsing the internet for all manner of possible boots that could possibly be:

• in that color
• with a thick, low heel
• reaching just above mid-calf
• that didn't have a zipper in the front (difficult to cut)
• and were less than $100

Needless to say, nothing was an absolute perfect match.  Fortunately I was able to find something fairly close on Amazon for about $70: Diba Women's pro gress riding boot.

The boot is suede, so it was fairly easy to cut.  For the intricate pattern around the edges of Rydia's boots, I decided to do beadwork.  All of it by hand.  All of it.  I probably poured close to 60 hours into plopping beads onto the boots.  When showing them to a friend, they asked why I hadn't simply used a bejeweler.  A bejeweler?  Never heard of one before!  I have heard of a Time-turner though, and could have used one to turn back the clocks before starting on this arduous beading endeavor.

Lesson learned: before tackling a difficult and/or time consuming task, do your research first!  It may end up saving you a lot of time and frustration.

It may look like the body of the boot is staying up nicely.  Lies and slander!  It was horribly flimsy even before cutting out the front.  Removing the front simply made it a lot worse.  In order to get the boots to stay up, I decided to attach them directly to the leggings.  Original plan was to use little velcro patches, however, they did not work very well. I ended up hot gluing the boots to the leggings.  Not the classiest approach, but it was at least functional.

Also, with all the beadwork I had a lot of knotted string on the interior.  In order to not have any of that nasty business show or irritate my legs from constant friction, I lined the insides with a suede-like cloth.  It ended up working nicely.

You can see that the bottom does not fit snugly to my leg, as the boot is wider around.   And, when walking (as above), the boot material bulges out toward the bottom.  If I had to do Rydia's costume over again, I would have tried to make boot covers instead of modifying the real deal.