Puff Away

Another rainy day idea (I don’t know why I’m stuck on these kinds of activities – must be the weather here). This one’s a big hit with my daughters and their friends – and of actual benefit when you’re trying to match socks to put away.

All you need are plain socks, the white cotton kind that you get in a multi-pack, some fabric paint in tubes, and patience (for the drying time). The tubes work best because you use the tips to draw the lines of your design and then fill in the colours. We like to use “puff” paint, the kind that puffs up when it dries, and glittery puff paint for details (princesses and tiaras are very big at our house these days).

Choose simple designs, like a stylized flower, or a smiley-face sun, or a stick figure – it takes a while for children to learn how to control the flow of the fabric paint, and it’s hard for little hands to do anything more complicated than that. For smaller ones, you can outline a very simple shape for them (circles of varying size, for example) and let them squeeze out a dot of paint in the center. They’ll get a kick out the way the paint puffs up when it dries.

Be prepared for a bit of mess – and for some other activity while you’re all waiting for your designs to dry. It’s best to leave the paint to dry overnight before wearing, but if there are no big globs of paint on the fabric, the little artists can admire their handiwork in a couple of hours, as long as they don’t try them on.