We tried our hands at some fabric paints today and I wanted to share this craft with all of you because we gave it an Urdu twist.
We love Crafty Carol by Cool School on YouTube and we followed her steps from this video.
I have added images and steps of our Urdu adaption of the craft. Thank you Crafty Carol for the amazing idea!
Things you need:
Fabric paints, an old tshirt (with long sleeves), a pen, some cardboard (you can use old cut up boxes) and a paintbrush
How to:
1. Set up a creative space with lots of kitchen roll handy for cleanups.
2. Spread out the tshirt and put cardboard inside it. This is to make sure no paint gets on the other side. We took out a cardboard box from our recycle bin and cut it into a couple of custom shapes for the sleeve and the body of the tshirt. Take a regular pen and draw an elephant on the Tshirt. The sleeve will be the trunk (Yes, what fun!). If you have a younger child, you can ask them to think of a name for the elephant while you draw.
3. Squirt out paint on the shirt and spread with a brush. Your child can help here and it’s great practice to draw inside the lines.
4. We named our elephant “Rani” and wrote the names both in English and Urdu. My daughter wanted her “angraizi” friends to be able to read the name also. For the outline and writing the names I used a fabric paint bottle with a narrow opening I found at the crafts shop. We made plenty of mistakes, but it was fun covering them up with more paint.
5. Leave to dry for 4 hours. According to the paint instructions don’t wash this shirt for 72 hours.
I’m no arts major and pretty terrible at drawing but still we had a great time making and personalizing this tshirt. Once we got going we took out another old tshirt and tried our hands on it. We have a squirrel in our backyard that we call “Gul Khan” (because a squirrel is called “gulheri” in urdu) so this shirt was personalized for Gul Khan.
We are thinking of making a similar “Rani the Haathi” onesie for the baby. Fabric paints are so much fun, maybe we will make a bag for “Sauda” (groceries) next. Keep on checking Urdu Mom for more urdu crafts! Thanks Crafty Carol for the amazing idea!