For anyone who likes making things, sharing creativity with a child is a special pleasure.  Helping a child find and execute a manageable project, however, can be challenging. Some of my children have been know to come up with plans like “Mom, can we sew a police officer’s uniform for Max the dog? I think it needs to have stripes down the sides of the pants and a metal badge too and he needs a miniature baton and handcuffs. I was thinking we could make the handcuffs out of tinfoil? Do we have any blue fabric?”

So, when my 10 year old recently asked, “mom, what should I make?” I felt lucky to be able to come up with a manageable project. I said, “Sharpie art. Lets decorate the shirt you’re wearing with one of the cartoon characters you’re recently invented.”  O.K., so maybe I didn’t actually say “recently invented” but you get the gist.

We scanned and enlarged his pencil drawing and then printed it out. He traced the drawing with black sharpie so it would show through a T-shirt laid on it. Then he changed shirts, placed his faded tie-die over the drawing (and a few extra layers of paper to prevent the sharpie from bleeding through to the back of the shirt) and traced with a black sharpie. Voila! Meet Moustatio. On a shirt.

The whole project took about 40 minutes and best of all, he did most of it himself.