Child Friendly Glue Batik on Fabric

For the past 6 months or so, during term time, I've been running a weekly after school craft club at the girls' local primary school. There have been a few things we've done that I've meant to post about here but have just never got round to it. Here at last is at least one post, about our most recent and by far my favourite activity - glue batik.

We spent a few weeks working on pictures with a 'sea' theme (obviously a topic dear to my heart!), and built up to the batik gradually. First of all we created sea themed pictures incorporating doodling patterns, just with coloured pencils.

Then we used these as some inspiration for wax resist paintings, using wax crayons and water colours.

And then finally I took in some pieces of plain white/cream cotton to create the batik fabric pictures. We used Elmers Blue Glue (I found mine on Amazon here), and it was perfect for this activity. There's a very helpful post to talk you through the process here on That Artist Woman. The children started by drawing their pictures very lightly in pencil, then they went over these lines with the glue. We left these to dry, and then added paint in our next session. We used watered down acrylic paints for this stage. Watering down the paint helps to stop the fabric becoming too stiff with the acrylics. After they had dried thoroughly I took them home for a hot soak and a scrub to remove the glue/pencil outlines. Once they were dry again and ironed, I folded over and sewed a flap into the top of each picture and inserted a piece of driftwood to each to hang them.

I think they all turned out beautifully, here are a few...

We put on an Art Show at the end of term, so these pictures are all from the displays there.

And whilst we're on the sea theme, it seems a good excuse to share some photos from one of our favourite beaches today - Speke's Mill, for anyone local. It's a bit too long and tricky a walk for Maria in particular, but both the girls were busy today with friends, so it was the perfect opportunity to head out with the boys.

So many amazing pools there.

And a gorgeous waterfall

Hope you're having a good weekend where you are too.

Sally.