Hand printed shopping bags

I got my craft on the other day with some home printed bags I made that were easy to do, didn't take a long time and make cute gifts as you can personalise the stamps you make to be something the receiver loves....

You will need:

Some plain cotton shopping bags
Fabric paint
Glue
Foam brushes
Sheets of craft foam
A piece of card the size of your bag
Iron
Clean tea towel or pillowcase

Do it:

Start by drawing your designs onto your foam sheets-the simpler the design, the easier to cut out!

Cut round your doodles and use the glue to stick this onto another piece of foam. It's better to make a little stack out of several pieces of foam to give you more to hold on to.

Insert your cardboard inside your bag, this will stop the printing going through to the other side of the bag.

Use your foam brush to paint fabric paint onto your stamp, being careful not to get the paint on the background foam.

Choose where you want to start your design and press the stamp firmly down. Peel up carefully so not to smudge the print and repeat, load up with paint, print, etc. until your design is finished.

Allow to dry and iron with a tea towel or something over the top to set the paint.

Also try on scarves, tops, skirts, table cloths, pillows.....whatever takes your fancy!

A little up-cycle project

Sometimes I see things in charity shop windows and decide that I need to buy them and make them into something better. I see potential in bedraggled looking old items that other people have seen fit to throw away. Often I don't actually follow up on my vision, but this time I did and bought a knackered old footstool from the charity shop near my work.

Anyway, in 2 afternoons I managed to turn this piece of 'junk' into something quite nice. Well, I like it anyway. I used an old duvet cover that had a tear in it to cover it, and used a tester pot of paint to paint the base with. Here's how it went in pictures....