Children’s Fabric Collage Is Easy and Fun
Children's Fabric Collages Inspire Creativity
In the modern world, so much our time is just spent staring at flashing lights. Little brains are never given the opportunity to come up with their own ideas and stories. Help your child make a simple fabric collage and this might inspire them to be more and more creative.
A very simple project, especially good for very young children. Fabric collages can be created from pre-cut felt shapes or simply cut out your own alien riding a squirrel. Or what ever crazy scene you want to create.
Embellish your scene further with paint, sequins, buttons or anything else you can imagine.
What We Need To Make A Fabric Collage
- Card 50cms square
- Blue cotton 60cm x 30cm
- Green cotton 60cm x 30cm
- Any other scraps of fabric
- Felt and fur fabric
- Pompoms, maybe some lolly sticks
- Glue, scissors, pinking shears, saucer to hold the paint, fine paint brushes
First Pick Out The Fabrics You Like For Your Fabric Collage
Get all your fabrics together and lay them out. Start imagining what sort of scene you could make. We are going to make a fun farmyard scene. So we need green for the grass and blue for the sky and some fabric pieces to make some animals.
Glue the blue and green fabrics to the cardboard. This is our background. Use the pinking shears to stop the fabric fraying over time.
When making a fabric collage, a good tip is to start with the biggest pieces and keep working down ending up making the fine details, painting and gluing on any embellishments.
After you have glued the background down to the card, allow the glue to dry.
Fabric Collage Trees and Clouds
Carefully cut out some trees from the brown and green fabrics. Then cut out some clouds from the white felt if you have it.
Please, do not worry about being accurate. It is more fun to have wobbly trees and clouds. Creating a fabric collage is about having fun, not being super realistic. My favourite fabric collages are always ones where something looks a bit funny or wobbly or cut out wrong. It adds real personality to your collage.
So do not worry about making a tree look exactly like a tree or a cloud look exactly like a cloud. If your cloud looks like a car, this could be an amazing story you could tell, about how birds actually drive around in cloud taxis.
To help with the shapes, find and print templates from the internet. Cut them out, pin them to the fabric and then cut around them. Save the templates you make for more fabric collages.
Assemble The Fabric Collage
Once you have enough pieces of your picture cut out, you can start placing everything in the right place on your background. Take your time and try and imagine yourself being there.
You can move things around, if you are not happy after a little bit. I change my mind all the time.
Once you are happy with the placement, simply glue each piece down to the background.
Finishing The Fabric Collage
Now we have some of the larger shapes glued down, we can take our time and cut out more details. This is your fabric collage and you can complete it however you like. Cut out more details and glue them on until you are happy.
We added some furry sheep and a pompom bunny rabbit. We also painted pretty flowers in the corners. Finally you can make a fence by sticking lollipop sticks along the bottom.
Your fabric collage will not look like ours, but that is great. Yours is better because you made it. Now we just need to make up a funny story about squirrels riding bunny rabbits like horses, on their way to the shops.
Have fun and let your little one's imagination go wild. But are there other things we can make?
Hang Your Fabric Collage Picture
You can hang your completed scene on the wall. Glue a piece of dowel along the back of the top edge and then attach ribbons and hang on your wall.
Other Fabric Collage Ideas
Why not make a tea cosy. This is really the same idea. Have a base or background piece of fabric and then cut shapes to add on top. Here we have hand sewn around the edge of the fabric shapes to give a nice finish. It's not that hard. Add a ribbon for decoration.
Fabric Collage Conclusions
How about making a fabric collage t-shirt. Find some fabric sheet adhesives. They come is thin sheets. You can cut these sheets to the same shape as your design. Then you use a hot iron to glue the pieces together.
Let your imagination go wild, decorating everything is funny fabric shapes.
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