DIY Clothing: Stylish Christmas Gifts for Kids

One of the best parts of the holidays is seeing your loved ones’ faces light up as they open that perfect gift. For kids, finding the perfect gift can be a bit more challenging. DIY Christmas gifts are a great way to ensure that you’re capturing your little ones’ unique tastes, interests and styles.

With DIY gifts, you get to incorporate kids’ unique personalities into the presents they receive, creating a personalized experience that tends to be more meaningful and on-target than store-bought gifts.

Whether the little people in your life are animal lovers, space fans or sports fanatics, DIY shirts and clothing allow you to create a gift that will never go out of style and become a closet favorite all year round.

Ideas to Help You Give the Perfect DIY Gift this Christmas

If kids share one common trait, it’s being picky. When it comes to clothing, kids usually have a very specific taste and style that’s all their own. With DIY clothes, you can create custom pieces that match kids’ styles, interests and personalities.

DIY clothes also have a sentimentality that kids tend to love and appreciate. When they wear something made just for them, they feel loved and seen, making DIY items a favorite clothing staple.

Like most DIY projects, it's usually helpful to have some initial inspiration to get things going, so here are our top five DIY kids' clothing ideas to help you create the perfect Christmas gift this year.

Go Wild with Animal Themes

Kids and animals just go together. Kids tend to be major animal lovers, so if you have an animal-obsessed child in your life, creating unique animal-themed DIY clothing can be a great and treasured Christmas gift.

One of our favorite things to do is to find some animal print for inspiration, some animal stencils or cut-outs and then create a fun patterned shirt, pants or sweatshirt that will make the little ones in your life feel like they’ve really gone wild.

For little ones that are into dogs or cats, another fun idea is to put some whiskers on a shirt, some ears on a sweatshirt or a mock-tail on some pants to create a multi-textured piece of clothing that could double as a costume or as a prop during play-time or recess.

If adding texture is above your artistic abilities, another great way to theme your DIY clothing gifts is to use colors to represent your kids’ favorite animals, like dying a shirt orange and black for a tiger lover or black and white for the little Zebra fans you love most.

Score a Touchdown with Your Tiniest Sports Fans

Few things garner more love and attention than sports, and kids are no exception. If you have some small sports fans in your life, creating DIY sports-themed hats and shirts is a great way to create the perfect Christmas gift.

If the kids in your life love a certain team, you can get an iron-on patch from any retailer and then use that to create a hat that your youngest sports fan will cherish for years to come. To make that hat your/their own, we love the idea of using paint to create a “splattered” motif or to use different dyes to create a one-of-a-kind multi-colored item.

For shirts and sweatshirts, you can take that same patch and get some iron-on letters to put the child’s name and their favorite player’s number on the back. With this idea, you end up with a jersey-like t-shirt that will impress their friends and fellow fans.

If the kids in your life love a sport but not a team or player, you can get some iron-on patches of items related to that sport and create a great shirt. For example, if you have a young gymnastics fan, you can find some uneven bar patches, leotard patches or horse (the equipment, of course) patches the equipment, of course) and create a whole gymnasium on your shirt. Again, shirt paint and tie-dye will help you complete the item and make things really pop.

Tie-Dye Perfection

Tie-dye has been around for decades, and for good reason. Tie-dye is a fun and easy way to create an eye-popping shirt or sweatshirt without requiring much time, effort or skill. For kids, tie-dye creates the perfect blend of color and shapes, offering unique clothing they will love wearing and showing off to their friends.

When choosing your tie-dye colors, go for your kids’ favorites, and don’t forget to make sure you have plastic gloves to protect your hands and then plastic or newspaper to protect any stainable fabrics or surfaces nearby.

Another tip is to select white or light-colored shirts and ensure that any items are washed and cleaned before dying. Once you dye your shirt, make sure to let that dye set before washing the item and getting it all wrapped and ready to go.

The holidays are the perfect time to let people know how much you love them, and for kids, the magic of the season makes gift-giving much more fun. With DIY clothes, you can create a unique, fun and personalized gift that the kids in your life will love, cherish and never forget.