Jun 27

Jun 27 Summer Kids Craft Camp Session 3: Painted Rainbow and Pom Pom Tote Bags

This week's Craft Camp involved a little fabric painting and a little pom pom making. We painted rainbows (or whatever design you would like!) onto tote bags. It's a fairly simple craft, but it creates something really fun!

Materials:

Canvas Tote Bags . You can also do this project with aprons, t-shirts, kitchen towels, etc.
Acrylic Paints. These can be any brand from the craft store.
Fabric Paint Medium. I used the DecorArt Americana brand, but any other brand of fabric medium would work as well.
Paint brushes
Pom Pom Maker
Yarn
Hot Glue

Instructions:

To begin, select the acrylic paints that you would like to use. If you are making a rainbow, you don't actually need very much paint. To make the paint more fabric friendly, add some Fabric Painting Medium to each color. I used a 2 to 1 ratio of Fabric Paint Medium to Acrylic Paint. The Medium makes the paint a little thinner and easier to spread. It also makes it a little softer on the material so it isn't so thick and hard. Mix your paint and paint medium well then begin painting your rainbow.

I decided to make thick rainbow stripes, so I only ended up having enough space to make four stripes on it. You can make the stripes in rainbow color order, but we thought it would be fun to mix up our rainbows a little and paint them in colors you wouldn't expect.

While you wait for your paint to dry, you can start making your pom pom clouds. Using any pom pom maker or even your fingers, make a pom pom out of yarn. You can decide how many you want on each side of your rainbow and you can even decide to make your pom poms different sizes. We made two different sizes for our bags.

Using a hot glue gun, apply your pom poms to your bag. These pom poms can go under your rainbow like clouds, or they can just be used to add extra embelishment to your bag.

You can heat set your design (just the paint, not the pom poms!) using an iron to make it washable. Because we painted on bags that I wouldn't really wash anyway, we didn't worry about heat setting.