Print your own Christmas Stockings

One can never have enough socks. – J.K. Rowling

Are you still looking for a meaningful Christmas activity for you and your family? How about making your own stockings? This is easy to set up and leaves more than enough open-ended possibilities to create and experiment with fun printing techniques.

Materials:

Stockings (or you can sew your own)
Building blocks (or something else to glue foam shapes onto)
Foam shapes (or cut your own with sticky back foam sheets)
Foam brushes
Acrylic paint or printing ink
Glue gun
Paper plates or any other trays
Optional: Instead of foam shapes you can also just use normal stamps or potatoes to print with (potato printing)

Step 1: Make a stamp

Make your own stamps! Use foam sheets and cut various geometrical and Christmas themed shapes to hot glue onto anything sturdy. We used a few old building blocks to make our printing plates.

Step 2: Print

Squeeze some paint onto your paper plates or any other trays. You can keep it simple and use just one color and one shape/stamp to print with.

Experiment with how many ways you can arrange a single shape in interesting ways to print on your stocking. Use more shapes and as many colors as you like. Use a foam brush to spread the paint evenly onto your stamp and press it down onto the fabric. Younger children might find it easier to dip their stamp into the paint. For more even results apply a new layer of paint before each print.