Simple Project: Waterproofing Canvas Shoes

Waterproof? Well, maybe more like water-resistant...but still.

When you are vegan, you don't buy leather. One major downside to this is that most canvas shoes are not coated, which means that you have to shop carefully to find the shoes with a rubber covered toe or, at the very least, something with some substance to it.

We recently upped our hipster cred by getting some Toms brand shoes. The vegan version is essentially a piece of canvas attached to a recycled rubber sole. When it is wet outside, they absorb water almost instantly. Thanks to the wonder of the internet, however, we have discovered a method for keeping our feet dry. Since I did this myself and took these pictures during my own process, I will not be crediting another site or blog for this.

Check it out:

Step 1 - get a small chunk of beeswax. Most natural food stores carry this in little bars. Take the wax and rub it against the canvas HARD. You need to deposit a lot of wax on the canvas for this step.

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Step 2 - Cover the whole shoe well. Make sure you get in all the little cracks and crags. The place to overdo it is along the seam between the sole and the body of the shoe.

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Step 3 - Now take the shoe and run your hairdryer on high and hot all over the shoe. Move slowly over each part and make sure the wax melts and absorbs completely into the canvas.

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Step 4 - Test out the final product. Run the tap over the toe. Does the water soak in or does it roll off? Hopefully it just rolls off.

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It's a beautiful thing! Try it for yourself. Now, these are Toms and I haven't tried this method on other brands of canvas shoes, but the premise is solid and should apply to pretty much any canvas shoe. I will try it on some of my other shoes soon and report back on my findings. In the meantime, if you have Toms, this works!