Holiday Craft

Anyone who reads my blog knows that I try to do a lot of crafts with the boys. Noah loves crafts and will choose to do them over pretty much anything else if I ask him. Aaron likes doing them but doesn't really stay with them very long.

While we were in Wisconsin, I had four tee shirts left over from the school year that I had taken along for the boys to make shirts.

Usually, I buy the Fourth of July shirts at Old Navy, but I had seen this article in Family Fun magazine and thought it wold be fun to try. I even watched the little You Tube instructional video in order to make sure we were doing it right.

It's actually pretty easy. You take pipe cleaners and twist them around and make spokes. Then you dip them into fabric paint and make fireworks on the shirt. If you twist them around or overlap colors, it makes for even more fun effects. The instructions tell you to use sparkly fabric paint, but Beth had what we needed on hand and regular paint worked just fine.

We did it with the older boys first, and then individually with the younger ones.



The next morning, Beth ironed the the front in order to set the colors and the front was ready to go.

Then we decided that it would be fun for each of the boys to sign the back of the shirts with the fabric markers for a reminder of the fun time. Noah started getting VERY creative with his lettering and then Alex followed suit, making for some pretty neat designs.

Of course, Noah STILL wasn't done and wanted to continue decorating the back of his, complete with drawing more fireworks on the sleeves, chain links connecting all of the names, and a robot on the bottom.


The morning it was time to leave, all of the boys put their shirts on to show off their handy work. Often, these projects end up looking kind of strange, but I think I think these ones turned out kind of neat.

I am in the process of washing them as I write this. I hope they turn out well so the boys can wear them on Saturday. The paint DIDN'T come out of the shirts that we accidentally got paint on. Hopefully that will prove a good thing for this washing.


It was definitely a neat craft and they will be souvenirs of sorts from our fun trip to Wisconsin.