DIY Craft - Cheap Way to Make Plain Girl's Clothes Fancy

Lately, my 4 year old daughter has become a little fashionista. She has to pick out her own clothes each day before school and might not like the clothes that I pick out for her when shopping. I favor the store Children's Place for kid's clothes shopping because of their excellent prices, frequent sales and online printable in-store coupons. I also appreciate the fact that they have a location in my town in New Jersey.

I recently found two pairs of pants for her in hot pink and tan. I knew that my daughter wouldn't like them because they had no designs on them and were too plain. However, the fit and price were perfect (size 3T and $6.99 each). Luckily, there is a Michael's craft store in the same shopping center as Children's Place and that's where I found the perfect embellishments to personalize those great pants.

I decided to look for patches or iron on designs to make the Children's Place pants fancy. Michael's has an entire section of iron on jewels and patches. There were plenty of designs to choose from that are perfect for little girls.

After much debate, I finally bought two packs of light pink heart patches that had a silver embroidered border and some multi colored daisies. Both sets of patches were the iron-on type, making the project extremely easy for anyone to do. The hearts came in packs of 4 for $1.99 each and the daisies came in a pack of 8 for $5.99.

As a "coupon queen", I know that Michaels has a weekly coupon in the Sunday sales flier inserts which gives 40% off any one item that is not on sale. I used this coupon for the patches.

My first step was to wash the pants to get them to feel softer and to have them shrink a little bit. Then I asked my daughter which patches she wanted on which pants. She chose to put the brightly colored daisy patches on the tan pants and the light pink heart patches on the hot pink/fuchsia pants.

There were eight patches for each pair of pants. So each leg was going to have 4 patches. The iron-on instructions were simple. Just place to patches in the desired spots, place a cloth over the patches and press with an iron for 30 seconds. Make sure to turn on the steam setting.

This was an easy and inexpensive way to make plain clothes fancy. My daughter loves the pants (see the attached picture for the results). I also plan on using iron-on patches for shirt and shorts embellishments.