This Tie-Dye Dress Mother’s Day Card is a unique and creative card for kids to make for Mother’s Day this year. The process is fun for all ages and it makes the perfect homemade card for Moms, Aunts, Grandmothers, Step-Moms or any female role-model a child wishes to honour on Mother’s Day.
Adorable Mother’s Day Card Idea
The hooligans love making homemade Mother’s Day cards to go along with the homemade gifts they make for their moms. We’ve been waiting to make these adorable cards for the better part of a year.
See, last year, my daycare kids made these “tee-rific” tie-dye tee shirt cards for Father’s day. The process was the same, but we tie-dyed paper towel “tee shirts” for those cards.
The kids had a lot of fun making them, and we were so impressed with how well they turned out that we all agreed we would make dress cards using the same art process when Mother’s Day rolled around.
But we’d have to wait for almost a year. Would we remember?
Well, here we are, 11 months later, and I’m proud to say that my old brain actually did remember our plan, so I had some little paper towel dresses all ready to go when the kids arrived at the craft table the other day.
They asked what we’d be making, and when I said Mother’s Day cards, Sophie, one of the younger hooligans, said, “Hey, remember we’re supposed to make dress cards like those tee-shirt cards we made last year?”
Ta-daa…. I’m one step ahead of you, girl.
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Now, you don’t need a lot of supplies to make these Mother’s Day cards, but you do need liquid watercolours if you want your dresses to look as vibrant as ours do in these photos.
To Make Our Tie-Dye Mother’s Day Cards, You’ll Need:
Supplies:
- 2-ply paper towels
- liquid watercolours
- medicine droppers (paint brushes will work too)
- ice cube tray
- card stock
- glue
- small buttons and ribbon (optional, but they make the dresses super-cute)
- markers for writing the messages on the cards
- my free printable dress template (optional)
- plastic table cloth protect your table top
Design Your Own Or Use Our Template
If you’re cutting out your own dress designs, just fold a piece of paper towel in half and cut out a few simple dresses. I made a basic tee-shirt dress with a flared bottom, a tee-shirt dress with a scalloped bottom, and a more formal, sleeveless dress with a scalloped bottom.
Free Printable Dress Template
Feel free to make your own dresses, but if you’d rather, you can print off my free dress template to use as a guide.
Protect your table top
Before you dye your dresses, you’ll want to protect your tabletop.
Liquid watercolours are washable, but if your tabletop is porous, there’s always a chance that some staining could occur.
Even though we had a plastic table cloth covering our table, I provided the kids with styrofoam produce trays to place their paper towel dresses on during the dyeing process to prevent the tablecloth from becoming wet and messy.
Dilute your watercolours slightly
Dilute your liquid a little, but to get nice, vibrant results, you won’t want to water them down too much. I think we dyed the tee shirts for our Father’s day cards at full strength last year.
I wanted these dresses to be a little softer looking than that project so I added about a tsp of water to each section of our ice cube tray.
Dyeing your paper towels
The kids had a lot of fun dripping their watercolours all over the paper towel dresses.
This is one of their favourite art processes. It’s fascinating to watch the paper towel soak up the water colours and to see the colours blend together. The effect really does look like tie-dye.
When they were finished dyeing their dresses, the kids placed them beside the fire to dry for a half hour or so.
You can place your dyed paper towels in a sunny, sheltered spot or help them along with some heat from a hair dryer.
When our dresses were dry, the kids used paint brushes to spread white glue on the back and they glued them on the piece of folded card stock.
They’ll need to take care here because the paper towels are 2-ply, and the layers can separate if you don’t handle them gently.
Now, the dresses were completely adorable at this point, but to make them even cuter, the kids added some tiny, colourful buttons to their dresses.
Then I found some thin ribbon, and we made a few little bows for the kids to glue on to their dresses as well.
Aren’t these the sweetest little Mother’s Day cards ever?
Finishing touches
To finish, the kids used markers to add Mother’s Day messages to their cards.
We couldn’t think of anything as witty as our “tee-riffic” Father’s Day greetings last year, so they settled simply on writing “Happy Mother’s Day” on their cards.
Keep this fun homemade card idea in mind for your kids to make for birthdays too! It’s such a fun and original way to make a homemade card for someone special.
I think the hooligans’ moms are going to love them!
Happy Mother’s Day to all the wonderful Moms out there!
More Homemade Mother’s Day Ideas For Kids
For more cute ideas for cards and gifts that kids can make for Mother’s Day, check out:
5 Handmade Mother’s Day Gifts for Kids to Make
More Homemade Mother’s Day Gift Ideas
Jackie is a mom, wife, home daycare provider, and the creative spirit behind Happy Hooligans. She specializes in kids’ crafts and activities, easy recipes, and parenting. She began blogging in 2011, and today, Happy Hooligans inspires more than 2 million parents, caregivers and Early Years Professionals all over the globe.
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