Faux Stained Glass for Kids

My daughter has always said that when she is older, she wants to be an artist and I believe she will, she loves arts and crafts that much! This craft that Kylee and I did together came about because she and my son were going to a birthday party in which no gifts were requested but I felt bad showing up at a birthday party empty handed and figured a handmade gift made by my seven-year-old would be okay. Inspired by a piece of art she had brought home from school that looked like stained glass, using and overhead transparency and permanent markers, we decided that we would make this for the birthday boy and girl but put  a twist of our own in this project.

Here is what you will need:

• Clear acetate (overhead transparency)
• Permanent markers in various colors
• Letter stencils (we used my favorite crafting tool, the Silhouette Craft Cutter to cut out vinyl letters, you can also free hand your letters if you are confident enough, I am not.)
• Picture frame in whatever size you choose to make.

Here is how we made them:

1. cut your transparency down to the size you have chosen.
2.  cut out the name you have chosen either using a stencil or your Silhouette and apply to your transparency. (again you could  free hand the name if you have nice hand writing which I don't.)
3. using a black sharpie, just draw squiggles all  over your transparency, don't be afraid to cross over your lines it will be just fine and in fact I think it looks better that way.





after your lines are drawn, fill in each individual shape crated by the lines you just created using lots of different colors.









we allowed ours to dry overnight so that the colors don't smear.     







after they dried overnight we mounted them into cheap frames using just the frame and the glass so that the light could shine through like stain glass. To do this I applied mounting tape to the frame which is essentially a double sided tape made out of foam, often used to give dimension to scrapbook pages or cards. 

Here are the finished faux stained glass frames...its a really great project to do with your kids, send me a picture, I would love to see it your interpretation.                                                



The frame is white just like the one above, picture is just a little dark.

~ Emily