Crafting by a not very crafty mum - decorating baby vests

We have been so lucky to receive so many gifts and hand-me-downs for Little E. I don't think I had to buy him any clothes for the first 6 months!

The most recent batch was a huge bag of long sleeved vests. We are sorted until Little E is about 3 with this lot! A small selection below.

My friend is an artist and she had decorated some of the vests. Her son went through a phase where he refused to wear anything plain, so she used fabric pens to draw various designs.

She apologised for some of the vests being a bit grubby, but her Little L is a rough, tough little boy! I didn't care, but I thought it would be nice to be inspired by my friend and jazz the vests up a little.

I sorted all the vests out and had five in 18-24m. Big E is obsessed with his day of the week socks, so I thought it would be fun for his son to be in day of the week vests.

First step was to get some fabric pens. I went to Pen to Paper in Headington (great shop!) and they had several options. I didn't know what would be best, so I tried to choose a pack with lots of colours that I liked.

These are what I ended up with. I'm quite pleased with them, but they are not that easy to use. As you draw, you have to squeeze the paint out, rather than being more like a marker pen, which was what I was expecting. However, they dry in 5 hours and you don't have to heat seal them, so they are ready to go immediately. I have washed a t-shirt I used the pens on and the design has stuck beautifully. I like the way, if you get things right, you can create a shiny ridge of paint, which is nicely textured.

So, here are my day of the week vests:

I started with Monday. As usual, I lacked confidence in my abilities and decided to use stencils to write out the words. This was quite hard with the pens I used, as the pain could ooze under the plastic and run a bit. It also meant you had to do one letter at a time, as you had to wait for the paint to dry before you could put the stencil back on top. By the time I got to Thursday and Friday, I was doing it by hand and actually it was really easy and I was pleased with how it looked.

Tips: I put a cereal box inside the vests. This gave me a surface to work on and pinned the vest down. It also stopped the paint soaking through to the back of the vest.

For each day of the week, I wanted a simple motif to explain where the name came from. Any excuse to squeeze in a bit of education! "Moon-day" made sense to be in blue with a simple circle. Again, I used a stencil for the blue moon, but when I did Sun-day I found it was easier to do it by hand. It was good I chose very simple motifs, as the most complicated design was the tree Yggdrasil for Woden's-Day and with my gel fabric pens it was pretty hard. If I can find fabric pens more like markers, I think it will be easier to draw something more elaborate.

As usual, I'm pretty slap-dash, so a couple of times, I didn't line the letters quite centrally, so I would use the motif to even up the design.

So, overall I'm pretty pleased. They turned out much smarter than I thought they would and I won't be ashamed to put Little E in them. They will probably be under a nice t-shirt anyway!