We’re having a ‘Kids Crafternoon’

A big truck drove up our long drive way the other day, and it wasn’t carrying building supplies!

It was carrying two books for my kids and I to review, Kids’ Crafternoon – Paper Craft and Kids’ Crafternoon – Sewing. Both books are edited by the lovely Kathreen from Whipup and published by Hardie Grant and I’m excited to be part of the Kids’ Crafternoon Blog Tour! So excited in fact that I bumped our regular Saturday links to take my place on the list! (don’t worry, you’ll get your links tomorrow!)

When the books arrived my big kids and I turned the pages and oohed and ahhed over all the lovely craft activities contributed by a range of talented crafters from all over the world. Both books are filled with lovely photographs as well as excellent step by step illustrations and cover a range of techniques for both beginners and more experienced hands.

Despite the target age for these books being seven and up, my four year old boy has bookmarked a few projects he’d like to do. Many of the projects would be great for interested, younger children with some adult support, especially those in the paper craft book. With a little help my boy is going to love making and flying the paper kites (contributed by Rob Shugg) .

My seven year old twins have poured through the books again and again, discussing which projects they’d like to do. They are saving boxes to try the shadow box project (contributed by Lisa Tilse) from the Paper Craft book, as they love to set up little displays of all of their tiny toys and trinkets. The sewing projects require a little more skill but many of them that are possible for beginners and those without a sewing machine. We’d like to make the fabric broaches (contributed by Lisa Tilse), perhaps as Christmas gifts?

In the end I think they agreed that they’d like to do them all! Sadly for them I a tad less ambitious and so for today, we settled on making ‘Wallflowers’ from the Papercraft book, contributed by Dana Willard. This project was easy enough for my four year old to help with some of the steps, and for the seven years to do pretty much on their own. And best of all, we already had everything we needed in the cupboards making this a quick, easy and successful project – my favourite kind!

You can read more about these great books (two more in the series are due out soon) by following the blog tour. Yesterday Poppytalk kicked off the tour with a great interview and you can find the rest of the blogs and their tour dates below…

24 July Little Eco Footprints
25 July Beaspoke quilts
26 July Maya Made
27 July Checkout girl
28 July The red thread
29 July We Wilsons
30 July Maggie Makes
31 July Mmm Crafts
1 August Domesticali
2 August Floating Ink
3 August Elizabeth Abernathy
4 August Mommy Coddle
5 August The Long Thread
6 August Hannah Fletcher
7 August Between the lines
8 August Go Make Me

You can buy both books from Booktopia and they’d make a great gift for a crafty kid, or even a crafty grandmother… or really anyone who is crafty as so many of the projects have made my ‘To Do’ list too!

{Disclaimer : I was given a copy of both books to review but was not compensated in any other way for this post. The opinions in this post are purely my own.}