Blank white umbrella + fabric paints + permanent marker= fun arts and crafts hour for myself and 3 year old.

A week or so ago when in Cork city centre with my two cailíní, we headed into a really good toy shop on Maylor Street. It’s name I can’t remember but its located a few yards before the giant Smyths toystore.

Anyhow, its packed full of arts and crafts kits, games, jigsaws, wooden toys, baby toys, dolls houses and plenty more. The children love it. Whilst there, the rain and sun umbrella kit took Sibéal’s fancy so we bought for €11.99.

I must confess I usually run a mile from doing painting or arts stuff with the kids. I prefer baking, reading or playing a game with them and Conor’s the papier-maché king here. But this looked straightforward enough so yesterday we had a go!

The kit contains a plain white waterproof kid’s size umbrella, a permanent marker, a small paintbrush and a set of 6 minipots of fabric paint. The instructions were clear and gave suggestions to mix the paints to create different colours and to water them down if you preferred a more watercolour look to your design.

Basically we outlined a few basic shapes on the umbrella using the marker and then painted them in. The umbrella was left to dry for 12 hours et voilá:

It was great fun to do and we both really enjoyed it. The result as you can see, is no great art masterpiece but it’s totally unique to Sibéal and she loves it. She was delighted that it was raining this morning so she could bring it out to show all her pals.

Definitely a success and we look forward to trying out more of the creativity for kids kits.

Rated 5/5 on Sep 16 2007 by ManicMammy
Review Tags: activity, art, art and crafts, children, colour, craft, drawing, fun, paint
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