While I am soaking up the rays in Florida (while wearing SPF 50 and a big floppy hat), I will leave you with 4 days worth of quick and easy crafts. You may have seen some of them multiple times.  Some may be new. All with be easy, fairly quick and inexpensive ways to entertain your friends. Enjoy!

How do you entertain two of your favorite people during a cold (and spitting snow) day in April?  You make them do crafts with you.  And then you take them to look at the flooding Mississippi river.  What can I say?  I know how to entertain.

In the middle is my best friend from my days at the University of Northern Iowa, Amanda.  I helped Amanda pass Physics.  Amanda made sure I didn’t study for 4 years straight.  Equally important.  On the right is my best friend from childhood, Melissa. Melissa and I share a love of Adam Sandler, Sangria and talking about the good ol’ days of being nerdy high school kids.  Neither of these fine ladies thought they were good at crafting.  I disagree.

Our first adventure was ombre striped tea towels.

I love tea towels.  They remind me of the summer days I spent painting them with my brother and Grandma when we were little.  Memories.  Painted mice/day of the week towels are cute but my tastes have slowly evolved over the years.  Thankfully.

Here’s what you’ll need to paint my ombre striped tea towels.

• Tea towels (You can find them at Target, Wal-Mart, Joann’s, etc.  I got a pack of 4 from Target for $4.)
• Fabric paint or acrylic paint plus fabric medium. 
  • As my supposedly non-crafty friends learned, fabric medium keeps any paint from feeling crusty on fabric.
• Painter’s Tape
  • I’m not brand loyal. I use whatever we have around.  The blue.  The green doesn’t matter.
• Paint brush
• Something to place under your towels.

You will start by taping off your towel.  My type A personality makes projects like this hard so I handed this step over to Amanda.  She tells me the secret to her taping success is that she “just doesn’t care.”  Write that down.  It’s a very important tip.  She did a fantastic job.  She tells me she is available for hire.

Place your professionally taped towel on to something to protect your table.  We used cardboard.

Next you will need to pick your color.  We decided to start with coral.  Who doesn’t love coral?  My paints were all acrylic so we picked two parts paint to one part fabric medium.  We added some white painting to the coral for each stripe to create the ombre effect. Take your paint brush and cover the striped areas!

Keep adding white paint, fabric medium and painting stripes.  When your painting is complete, remove the painter’s tape.  This part was terrifying.  Luckily we had little bleeding and it looked pretty darn awesome.

We hung the completed towels to dry on my laundry rack.

The towels will need to be heat set with an iron and then washed. I’m excited to add a little striped cheer to our kitchen.

Are you a striped tea towel fan?  Do your force your non-crafty friends into crafting?