Kids Sports – Craft Ideas for baseball

Sense memory is a very powerful thing.  The wafting of a nearby hot-dog stand on a hazy, hot day; the murmurs and cheers of an excited crowd; the taste of sweet, cooling soda sloshing down your yelled out, perched throat; the sight of adjacent colours of your favourite team and suddenly you can close your eyes and envisage a whole stadium full of enraptured baseball supporters and the thwacks and raucous of star hits.

Many people enjoy a healthy passion for sports and live vicariously through their favourite teams and players.  This passion, like a Roman nose or a useless tongue rolling ability is often inherited by your kids who love the quality time and days out at games with their folks.

Bedrooms are plastered with posters of sports personalities and team memorabilia.  Novelty items, cards and autographs are collected and prized possessions by devoted young fans, living the ‘American Dream’.  In season this interest grows exponentially and your kid’s mind tunnels to the odour of a soft glove and feel of a wooden bat. 

Why not encourage your children to expand their mind and creativity by playing the trump card of including baseball in your activities that can be fun and exclusive of all the family?

Here are just a few crafting ideas to capture their wide imaginations and tempt them from their computer games and televisions!

Every fan worth his salt has trading card souvenirs so how about making a personalised baseball card album to keep your collection safe and together?

The best method is to buy some 3 inch by 4 inch premium toploader plastic sleeves for trading cards. 

Use a hole punch to create holes in the open top corner of the sleeves.

Be creative!  Cut out some coloured card to 3 inches by 4 inches and design a cover.  You could use glitter glue, paint, maybe some white foam to cut out a circle and draw on baseball threads to make a ball.

Slid your cards and cover into their holders but you can also add all sorts of personalised pages like gluing photos from magazines or newspapers onto some card and including them or even adding some written pages with your favourite memories or make out a table to keep track of scores.

Stack up all your inserts and line up the holes.

Bind them together – you can do this by using wool, cord, twine, wire or even a metal ring from a keychain and feel free to add ribbons or material to your ring and now you have your own personal baseball memory book.

Trying to think of ways to accomplish this without purchasing toploader holders; you could use stapled or glued acetate or make card sleeves cutting out a frame for the visible side and gluing tracing paper, fine stocking material or gauze to form a window or even just squares cut from clear plastic bags or pockets of photograph albums.

Make your own baseball cap.

Take a small kitchen bowl that will fit snugly over your child’s head and place it face down on a table.

Dig out some old newspapers and place three or four sheets over the bowl.

Press down to the paper to mould it around the bowl and use some masking tape to tightly circle the base of your paper covered bowl.

Cut away the excess newspaper around the masking tape leaving the paper at the front of your bowl to cut out a sun visor, bill flap.

Once you have your basic hat shaped mould strengthen the flap and back of the hat using strips of masking tape.

You can now paint and decorate your hat and be creative.  It can sport your team colours, have photos of your favourite players, glue on foam made baseballs and bats, you could even use a straw with a pipe cleaner inside and mask it upright onto the centre of your hat and add a flag.

Once you’re done and everything’s dried you may want to paint over your design with clear drying glue to give it strength and durability.

Make your own baseball t-shirt

What you will need:

Colourful crayons

A light coloured t-shirt

Wax paper (or sandpaper)

A towel

An Iron and ironing board

It is a good idea to wash your t-shirt if you have bought it new as a lot of colour often comes out in the first wash.

Design your t-shirt.  Lean heavily on the crayons and draw your baseball images onto the wax paper.  Remember if you are writing the name of your favourite team or a slogan you have to write the mirror image of the word or it will appear backwards on your finished t-shirt.  A good way of doing this is practicing first on a sheet of plan paper.  Write the words you want in your design normally onto the paper and then hold a mirror vertical beside the words on your page.  When you look in the mirror your words are backwards and if you copy what they look like backwards in the mirror onto your t-shirt they will come out forwards!

Get an adult to set up the ironing board and heat up the iron.

Place a towel inside the t-shirt between the front and the back.

Lay your design face down on the t-shirt trying to get it in the centre.

Ask an adult to iron the back on the wax paper on a pretty high heat for a couple of minutes.

Gently ease up one corner of the paper and check if the colours are transferring.  If they are not you will have to iron it longer.

Switch off the iron.  Peel away the wax paper and voila, your own created image is now on your special baseball t-shirt.

Some people use sand paper for this technique and others use fabric crayons and normal plain paper.  Of course you can also get your kid to draw a design, scan it onto a computer, flip the image and print it onto proper t-shirt transfer paper that it then ironed and peeled away.

A few other ideas include:

Baseball baking – get your child to help you in the kitchen and bake some shortbread that can be iced to look like the ball from their favourite sport or bake some dough balls and ice on some threads.

Make your own baseball using old stockings and filling the feet with rice or dried peas.  Twist the material to make a tight ball and pull the material back over the ball inside out.  You can then cover the ball in white fabric or even a white plastic bag and felt tip on some red threads.

Create your own baseball scrapbook or picture frame cutting out designs from felt or foam and adding all your keepsakes like ticket stubs or photographs.

Paint a clean, smooth, round rock white and turn it into a baseball paper weight.

Use fimo or modelling clay and a safety pin to mould your own baseball themed badge.

Create a diorama of the field and cut out players gluing their photos onto card, cutting around them carefully and leaving a rectangle of card on the bottom that you can fold in on itself and glue together it form a stand.

There are literally hundreds of crafting ideas out there that can be tweaked to your baseball theme and distract bored kids while you work.  The crafts can be a cheap, as using whatever recycled materials and bits and bobs you find round the house, or as expensive as a proper craft shop retail trip as you like.  Ignite their imagination and passion this season and give them the satisfaction and accomplishment of creating something unique and wonderful that you will look back on and treasure for years to come.

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