Bug Crazy: Stamped T’s for Kids and Babies

Spring birthday parties and baby showers are the perfect excuse for crafting fun gifts for the little guys! Today’s project focuses on one of our favorite techniques- fabric stamping! Lindee and I love this kind of project because it’s so customizable! We love stamping dish towels (see that tutorial here) as well as accessories (check out my Funny Bunny scarf)! T-shirts maybe my favorite things to stamp, though, because you can create looks you can’t find in stores! I think the little guys will love some personalized duds, so let’s get started!

Before any painting could happen, I washed, dried, and sometimes ironed the clothes. (You don’t want the fabric shrinking under your beautiful, non-shrinking paint job!) You also don’t want paint to bleed from the front of the shirt onto the back. One way to prevent that is by inserting a liner of paper or other flat material inside the shirt. I have used big cut-outs from paper bags for large shirts. I have also used sheets of wax paper when I anticipated using a lot of wet paint. For my project today, I used pieces of scratch paper cut to fit into the body and sleeves of the shirts.

That done, I got out my fabric paint, paint brushes, paper plate palette, and collection of foam stamps. I’m going with a bug theme this time! You can find a cute set of similar stamps online! I bought the stamps for this project, but you can check out my Funny Bunny scarf tutorial (here) to see instructions for making your own stamp!

I started by doing a test run with the caterpillar stamp. On my palette, I mixed paint colors until I got the yellowish-green color I wanted. Next, I painted the stamp with paint. I practiced stamping several times onto scratch paper.

I prepped my work surface (in this case, my kitchen floor!) with a drop cloth made from a plastic shower curtain. I had already lined the baby onesie with paper, and I now placed it on several pieces of paper towel. Using the same method I had used on the scratch paper, I began stamping the onesie. I tried to space the caterpillars evenly but also somewhat randomly. The paper towels caught extra paint from caterpillars that were “crawling” on and off the sides of the onesie!

I used this method with other stamps and paint colors to embellish more onesies! So cute!

For the big kids, I stamped some shirts with only one kind of bug and stamped others with a mix of bugs and colors!

The painting and stamping took a while (especially on the multi-bug shirts), but I love the patterns and colors! I hope the kids go bug crazy for them! 🙂