Painted Rocks DIY Tic Tac Toe

Hey friends!  Adrianne Surian here with you today to share a fun idea for kids (and kids at heart)!  If you love DIY painted rocks, handmade gifts, or you just want something to stash in your bag for fun, this is a fun and simple wintry craft.  Play classic tic tac toe with painted stones and a storage bag game board with this easy DIY!

Supplies needed to make your own DIY painted rocks tic tac toe:

• 10 Smooth Stones, approximately the same size
• Acrylic Paint (I’m using red, pale blue and white today)
• Varnish
• Size 10 Flat Paintbrush
• Size 0 Liner Paintbrush
• Stylus
• Drawstring Bag
• Red Permanent Marker

While it may seem silly to buy your stones rather than gather them up from outside, decorative stones are often pre-sorted by size and tumbled to similar shapes.  You can certainly go pick rocks from your yard (assuming your yard isn’t in an area covered in snow) but please remember not to remove rocks from commercial landscaping or public parks – those stones were bought to stay there.  Get permission to collect rocks, or go the easy route and buy some stones approximately 1 inch in diameter.

Next – paint!  I covered half the rocks in red and half the rocks in blue paint.  Using a wide, flat paintbrush works best for covering stones in background colors.  And don’t forget the bottoms of the stones!  You can follow my lead – these colors look great together – or choose whatever color scheme you like.  Allow the rocks to dry fully between coats of paint (and you can speed this process up with a hair dryer set to the coolest setting).

Paint a fun design on the stones.  It’s winter here and the snow is falling, so I painted some snowflakes with a small liner brush and added detail with my stylus.  Take a look at these designs or look for snowflake clip art patterns to paint simple snowflakes.

Finding snowflakes to be a challenge?  Try mittens, emojis, hearts, stars, or presents!  My version is more of a tic tac snow but the ideas to personalize this are endless!

Finally, using a straight edge (like a ruler or a piece of paper), draw the tic tac toe board onto the outside of a drawstring bag to complete the set.  Permanent marker was easiest for me, but you can paint or even stitch your lines on.

This painted stone tic tac toe game is portable, quick to play, and it self-stores in its drawstring bag.   The handmade painted rocks make it a sweet gift to give, especially to a child, a neighbor, or someone you may not know well.  The supplies will make up several sets, making these well under $5 each.

I hope you enjoyed today’s DIY painted rocks tic tac toe game, and I’ll see you again soon!

Adrianne

Adrianne is a writer, artist, designer, wife, and mom of 2 kids. She blogs at happyhourprojects.com where the theme is tutorials and recipes that can be made in an hour or less. Her favorite projects are jewelry-making, paper crafts, and recycled crafts. She participates annually in ArtPrize, an international art competition, and she’s the author of the book DIY T-Shirt Crafts: 50 Ways to Recycle a T-Shirt (August 2015).