St. Patrick’s Day Crafts with Handprints & Footprints

St. Patrick’s Day is coming up! So, it’s the perfect time to make some memories with your kiddos and save a snapshot of their growth all at once with fun St. Patrick’s Day Crafts. As many of you know, I love doing handprint and footprint crafts with my boys to track their growth. In particular, we like to make shirts, which I will eventually turn into a t-shirt quilt once we’ve accumulated enough of them over the years as they grow. So, for this St. Patrick’s Day, we pulled out the fabric paint and had fun with the Irish theme!

I found their shirts at Kohls. They weren’t ideal—Donovan’s had a pocket on it, and Avery’s had a button-up collar—but they were the best I could find without ordering online. The fabric paint can be found at any craft store. We’ve built up quite a stockpile now in a number of colors. And for ideas on the shirt designs, I looked around on Pinterest for a while. Donovan’s handprint shamrock came directly from a picture I saw on Pinterest. But, Avery’s rainbow pot of gold I sort of made up myself based on a few variation from Pinterest that you can see on my Holiday Board.

The Shamrock is very simple. First place a piece of cardboard or paper bag inside the shirt to prevent the paint from bleeding through. Then, using just one of your child’s hands, paint it lightly with fabric paint, and press firmly on the shirt (or use acrylic paint and paper if you prefer). Repeat the process three more times in the various directions, and then paint on a stem. If you need to, you can always fill in the handprint with a little more paint so it stands out more on the shirt.

For the footprint Rainbow and Pot of Gold, you can do it two ways. If you are using a larger piece of paper, you could easily paint your child’s foot each of the 7 colors of the rainbow and do 7 footprints, plus an extra black one for the pot. But, that wouldn’t have fit on Avery’s shirt. So, I painted his foot two or 3 colors at a time, as you can see in the picture, so there were only 3 footprints plus the black one. Just space them carefully so you will have enough room for all of them. And then use a marker, the other end of a paintbrush, or another small circular shape to stamp the gold circles onto the top of the black pot footprint.

Both shirts were pretty easy to make, and they came out really cute, I think! Just be sure it’s not just before or just after nap time when you try to do it…tired babies don’t like their feet messed with! Have you done any fun St. Patrick’s Day crafts with your kids this year?