Got a spare half hour? An extra 10 bucks? A few cute ideas? It’s so easy to individualize baby undershirts and romper pants with scraps of lace, ribbon, rhinestones and tubes of squeeze-on paint. You’ll have fun doing it, and you’ll save money, too.
Why spend $30 or more for similar ensembles sold in department stores when you can make your own for $4 to $8? You don’t even need a sewing machine.
Create coordinated outfits for your own child, for baby showers and gift-giving holidays. Paint matching hearts and dinosaurs on tops and bottoms; create “rumba” pants by gluing double rows of lace on the back and on the sleeves and bottom of the undershirt; embed a rhinestone in the middle of a bow on a pair of socks.
Like a good cook, you’ll add a bit of this, a dab of that, and come up with your own wonderful concoctions.
Start collecting scraps of material for homemade appliques. If you are not very artistic, browse through children’s books for easy-to-trace animals or scenes. Once you get the hang of it, you can expand your glue-gun, hand-painted repertoire to socks, sneakers, denim overalls. T-shirts and other inexpensive, no-frills cotton separates for older children can be similarly adorned.\
Is the baby’s shirt ruined by carrot juice or chocolate stains? Cover the stain with an applique. Bring a hand-me-ddown to life by painting a picture on it, orr make it a high fashion item with ribbon and lace.
Plain cotton undershirts come in packages of three for about $5.99, cotton panties cost between 99 cents and $1.99. Once you’ve made the initial investment for equipment – glue gun ($4.99 to $25, depending on the model), tubes of liquid plastic paint ($1.99 to $3.50 per color), rhinestones with prongs ($1.40 per package of 10), rhinestone studder (60 cents) rose buds ($2 to $2.50 per package of six), and lace and ribbon (33 to 66 cents per yard) – the sky’s the limit to what you can do.
Plan to decorate three or four outfits at a time – it’s more efficient. You can work in front of the television set in the evening, when the kids are in bed. Or host a decorating party with a couple of friends and spend an afternoon creating baby confections. Share equipment, scraps of material, ideas.
Discount department stores, fabric stores and arts-and-craft supply stores sell most of what you need.
Here are some other suggestions:
Use only 100 percent cotton garments. Wash to preshrink and remove sizing. Iron to remove wrinkles before decorating.
Insert sturdy cardboard in clothes to provide a firm platform for decorating, or stuff with diapers or fabric.
When washing, turn decorated garments inside out so that rose buds or lace don’t snag. Remove immediately from the dryer; paint tends to stiffen after repeated washings.
When making your own applique, use a template. Draw the character – a bear, dinosaur, sun – on the fold of a piece of paper (so both sides will be even when you open it out). Then trace and cut out the design on cardboard. Place the cardboard template on the fabric you want to use for the applique, trace and cut out.
For appliques and ribbons, use polyester or poly-blend fabric that won’t shrink or need ironing.
Don’t glue on rhinestones – use extra-long prongs to embed them firmly in the garment so the baby won’t swallow them.
Look for a glue gun with a trigger. It will cost a bit more, but it will allow you to control the glue as you apply it.
Sew on large appliques – don’t glue them, because the glue tends to harden and crack and the fabric will feel scratchy.
For painting on baby clothes, you want the thinnest nozzle you can find. Large tubes (about $3.50) have thicker nozzles. To get around that, you can buy a thin-nozzled Wood Glue Applicator (79 cents) in a craft store and squeeze the paint into it. When finished, squeeze the excess paint back into its original container and wash out the glue applicator so you can use it again with another color. The paint is water soluble until it dries.
Plastic paint comes in slick, iridescent, glitter and puffy varieties. The puffy paint becomes three-dimensional. After it dries (to be safe, let all paint dry overnight), turn the garment inside out and steam iron it. The steam activates the paint so it “puffs.”
Keep scrap material handy to clean the tip of the paint tube. A blob of paint will develop whenever you lift the tube off the shirt. If you don’t wipe it off before you begin again, it will mar your design.
Shop the sales. Buy batches of baby garments and decorative materials.
