Glittered Vintage Ice Skates

I love mixing new and vintage decor. Making glittered vintage ice skates area fun way to take something old and vintage and make it fun, sparkly and new. I always come across vintage ice skates in the at estates sales and thrift stores during the summer months. They become pretty hard to find once the holiday decorating starts, so keep an eye out starting in late spring into later summer and pick them up then! There is a video below with a bit of the step by step, or you can continue onto the tutorial below.

This post contains affiliate links. See our sponsor and affiliate disclosure here.

When glittering vintage ice skates, the first thing is to give them a good cleaning and to make sure they don’t smell of mildew or mold. Chances are they were stored in someone’s basement at one time. If they smell, they are probably fine for outdoor decorating, but I wouldn’t want to use them indoors at all. To glitter them you’ll need tacky white craft glue, mica glitter, a fine metallic glitter such as copper, gold or sliver. Also, don’t forget any greenery, jingle bells or ribbons you want to embellish them with. Find the supplies on Amazon here.

To add glitter to the vintage skates, use a soft, flat brush to liberally paint the tacky white craft glue on the skate. Since it can dry quickly, do it one side at a time or in sections, painting and glittering as you go. Once you have your section coated in glue, sprinkle a thick layer of glitter over the area. I prefer to do this over an old paint tray to catch the glitter so I can pour it back in my bottle and reuse it.

I used a natural Mica glitter for the main body of the skate, because I loved the look of the chunky, iridescent glitter. You can use whichever glitter you prefer.

Using white tacky glue instead of spray adhesive to glitter your vintage skates will ensure better adhesion since you can put on a thicker coat of glue to catch more glitter.

Once the skate is covered completely, shake the excess glitter off and reapply any glue and re-glitter as needed.

Repeat this step for the blade. Vintage ice skates are generally not sharp since they were used for gliding not figure skating, but could still have a sharp edge, so always use caution if necessary to not cut yourself.

I prefer to glitter over an old paint tray because it has a larger size and has sides to collect the glitter. It’s easy to tip it into the deeper reservoir at the end and then pour it into a funnel to return the unused glitter to the jar. Check out this post on glittering ornaments for a few tricks on applying glitter.

Once your skates are glittered, you can add real or faux greenery into the tops like I did on this pair which I applied sliver glitter on the blades instead of copper. I tied the two laces tog ether to create a loop to hang them on, but you can replace this with a pretty ribbon instead. As usual, keep out of reach of small children or pets. Vintage ices skates are fun to decorate with and are one of those items you can keep out all winter long!