Rainy days don't have to be gloomy days. Jazz up the winter months with a home-made personalised brolly. Express yourself and shake off those rainy days blues. Add pictures, phrases, names or symbols to your umbrella. You don't need any artistic skills, just a steady hand.

All you need is...
a computer with a printer, an umbrella, fabric paints, a lamp and some selotape.

Choose a plain umbrella to work with. Patterned umbrellas distract from the design and drown it any colour brolly will do, even dark colours such as navy or black.

The umbrella should be made from a nylon plastic and not PVC. The fabric paints used to decorate on the umbrella are not as effective on PVC umbrellas.

Adding a slogan onto the umbrella.
To do this, write a slogan onto a word document on a computer. Make the font as large as possible and chose a font for your slogan. I chose the slogan "It's raining again..." Which I thought was appropriate and would be great for any Madness fan, and I chose font "Goudy Stout" A bold chunky font.

Print out the slogan when you are happy with it. Due to the size of the text the words may get broken up onto different lines, don't worry about this because they can be selotaped together.

Cut out the words leaving a good couple of cm's all around the text. Selotape the words back together as necessary. Balance the 'up' umbrella on the backs of two dining table chairs back to back but parted. Sit a lamp on the floor beneath the umbrella so that it shines up through the brolly like a backlight. This is so that you can see the text through the fabric of the umbrella.

Using the selotape, stick the slogan to the underside of the umbrella ink side up.

Using fabric paint trace around the text, filling in the appropriate parts in paint. Because the text is traced it is neat, all the same size and constant and looks professional.

The same principle can be applied to images. Find a simple bold picture in a Google image search, or photobucket.com. Hello Kitty is a great example. Print out the image and then trim off the excess paper.

Selotape to the under side of an umbrella panel, ink side up. Shine the lamp up through the paper and the brolly and trace the picture with fabric paints.

You could have a whole array of characters in a freeze around your brolly, the sky's the limit. Rainy days will forever be funky vibrant days!

A Riddle...
What will go up a chimney down or down a chimney down? But won’t go up a chimney up or down a chimney up?
An umbrella.