No-sew snowmen made out of dollar store socks! |
Snowman made from socks, customize one for every style and taste. |
Note: You can also use "lost" socks at your house that you can't find the pair for. |
White (long) men's socks (sold in packs of 2 at the Dollar tree)
Fluffy socks (stripes work best, and also no ankle-length or grips on the feet)
Scissors
Rubber bands
Rice (I bought a 20 lb bag of rice from Walmart)
Pearl stickers (I could only fine white, so we colored them black with sharpies)
Hot glue gun
Tall narrow cup (to pour the rice in the sock) and funnel
Optional:
Cotton balls or jingle bells
Buttons
Embellishments
9x13 pan to catch all the rice
Take out one men's sock. The part you are going to use is not the foot part, but the section that would go up the leg with the ribbing. With sharp scissors, cut about 1 inch past the end of the ribbing, close to the start of the heel. Place the toe part of the sock aside.
Each two pack of men's socks will make 2 snowmen. |
Turn the sock right side out again, with the rubber band end tucked inside.
The rubber band inside will now be the bottom of your snowman |
Fill a tall cup with uncooked rice.
We found that this tall water bottle was narrow and the perfect size to slide a sock over. A thin, tall travel coffee mug would work as well. We used a funnel to help the rice go into the right place. Oh we also used a 9x13 pan under all the rice activity to help keep rice from flying all over the kitchen.
The 9x13 pan saved us a lot of sweeping up time later |
You don't want to overfill the sock, because rice will start to come out the stretched out holes. |
Once the sock is full of rice, it is quite mold-able to the shape you want. |
Push the sock down again until you can gather enough material at the top to cinch another rubber band in place.
Your snowman project will look a little fat and flabby at this point. |
This will give your future snowman a "peanut" shape |
Make sure your head is a good proportional size. Readjust the rubber band if necessary |
fluffy socks from the dollar tree work great for this project. (no ankle length or grips on the bottom) |
Start at the tip of the toe and measure up 4-5 inches, before the heel and cut across. This will be your little hat.
Here's a little map of your cuts |
Take the toe part of your sock and flip over a bit of the bottom to form a brim (fuzzy socks have a lot of fluff, we pulled off a few fuzz balls as we went to make them look neater).
Now you have a cute little hat for your snowperson. |
This little guy is from the first year we made these. |
The "neck" part is at the very top of the sock. |
The elastic at the end of the sock will help keep the neck part of the scarf in place |
This will be in a ring, but cut the ring open and make one long strip for the scarf.
Making this a longer strip will help make the scarf on the snowman look more realistic. |
So hat, elastic neck scarf, and longer scarf is tucked up and under the next area. |
Here's our guy from last year looking all dapper. |
The snowman on the left has a tied knot for his scarf, the one on the right the material is just slipped through the neck one. |
All we need are some eyes and a few embellishments. I found these pearl stickers in the craft section of Walmart.
The only color they had was pale white, so we just used black sharpies to make them "coal" colored.
Stick them on to your snowman's face. These are sort of a stick once and don't touch them again kind of sticker. You really can't move them around because they will lose their stick.
Too big of an eye makes them look a little wonky, so test a size out before you stick. |
My daughters teacher told her she loves blue and purple, so that's the color scheme here. |
This last part for the hat is optional. The hat does tend to stick straight up, depending on how long it is, and so to make it look more like a floppy Santa/Elf hat, I took a little blob of hot glue and touched the tip of the hat to the side of the hat and held it a few seconds.
Snowgirl fashionistas. |
Here's a shorter hat with the pom pom straight up, and here's a hat where we glued a little part of the hat over, for another cute look. |
You can also use jingle bells, pom poms, anything you want. |
A fun party craft for kids that are a little older, otherwise you will have rice EVERYWHERE. |
Sports team colors for a customized gift... Here are Seahawks, and Sumner Spartan or WA Huskies school colors. |
The girls had fun designing these little guys to the tastes of the people they were making them for. We even used them to decorate one side of our fireplace mantle, which had a snowman theme this year.
We had a blast making these little guys, and it's not too late to make a few for some last minutes gifts for friends and family. Not to mention, if your kids are home on winter break and need something to keep them busy, this little craft could be right up your alley. Let me know if you make any of these and post pictures of how they turned out!
Have a great holiday season!