So it’s that time of year.
The leaves are turning fiery hues
of orange and red and yellow…
The grass is newly dusted with crystalline
tendrils of frost every morning…
Beloved family members gather inside the kitchen for a fresh, steaming cup of cider or a marshmallow-adorned mug of hot cocoa...
The crickets are chirping and singing in the evening... the crickets are chirping and singing and skipping their way into our basement… the crickets are chirping and singing and skipping and creepy-crawling all over our basement...
Yikes! I am tired of the crickets! My poor hubby has to chase one or two (or
five!) out of our basement every single day for the past week!
Who knew crickets could be such a problem?
But still, I will
take crickets over spiders any day. My
heart does the same initial “oh-my-gosh-what-is-that-giant-moving-black-thing-in-my-house?”
but after the initial adrenaline surge, I can safely say that I am equipped
to
handle a cricket with much more dignity than I can a spider.
(Translation: I can
use a sing-song voice to call for my hubby rather than clutching the baby,
dashing away, and screeching. Oh, what,
you thought when I said "handle" it that I meant I would actually do something
about the creature? Hahahaha….)
But back to my topic.
Because of the change in the weather (and the ever-present threat of
crickets!), I like to keep my little one’s toes safely encased within a cozy
pair of socks. Unfortunately, her somewhat-newly
acquired mobility skills involve a lot of running and tip-toe-ing -- both of
which are dangerous feats to attempt while wearing socks on tile. Or linoleum.
Or wood floors. Or basically, anything other than carpet.
She has two pairs of Rubber-Roos, which we love, love,
love. These thick-weave, rubber-bottomed socks do a great job of preventing
the slipping,
but just because we have them does not mean that I can find them,
and regardless of their location, eventually they do need to be washed. Which means, she ends up in regular, slippery
socks
and usually shortly thereafter, tears.
Hence, this project. I
saw somewhere online that a lady used Puffy Paint to skid-proof her child’s
socks, and decided to give it a try. I
ended up getting black, white, and silver Puffy Paint since the store was out
of most of their cute little girl colors (which was probably a good thing, all budget-type things considered, but a little disappointing at the time). Armed with the classic-but-boring color combo and whatever of her socks I could actually find,
I got to work.
I had a challenging time getting her socks to stay flat enough for
me to actually apply the Puffy Paint to the bottom in any reasonable
design. They kept twisting and folding
up on me. Enter: my handy-dandy…
holepunch? Hey, it worked!
I did have to be careful when pulling the sock off, since the handles of the holepunch
were wider than her little socks were, I found that it was easiest
to hold the tip and heel of the sock down flush against the table as I slid
the hole-punch out of the sock... otherwise the sock would rebound with
terrifying rubber-band type action, threatening to smash
newly-squeezed paint all over the bottom of the sock.
Also, because the holepunch was wider, a couple of my designs came out slightly distorted once the sock was removed and back to it's normal size. Among them were a sadly elongated ladybug, and a flower that was
a work of art... until i took it off the holepunch. Then it just looked kind of wilted and sad. For the most part, though, it was easy to compensate
just by eyeballing how much the
weave of the sock was stretched and
using the thread lines as my guide.
Another
thing to keep an eye out for: keeping the applicator tip of the Puffy Paint
clean. I blurred a few of the smaller
words and designs by letting extra paint smudgies build up around the tip.
All in all, I was pretty pleased with how they turned out!
Here are a few, just to show you.
Hope this is helpful for you!
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