Crafty Wednesday – Ten supplies for your craft container

Crafts can be a personal thing – you may prefer to avoid having markers (I personally hate glitter and curse myself every time I buy it because then I end up vacuuming it up for months) or you may really love pipe cleaners. However, there are some things that I personally feel are important to have on hand, preferably in a Rubbermaid container or some other box. If you keep these around, you’ll always be ready for some sort of arts & crafts project!

• Crayons – They can be used for drawing or coloring. If your kids are really young, the fatter crayons are better as they won’t break as easily.
• Glue – White glue is really handy but my five-year-old sometimes likes to set up a craft project on her own while I’m making dinner or putting the little one down for a nap, so we tend to buy glue sticks more often because they’re easier for her to use alone.
• Paper – The easiest art craft in the world is to draw a pretty picture, so always have lots of paper on hand. Whenever I go to the Dollar Store, I usually pick up a pad of regular paper and a pack of colorful construction paper for each of my girls.
• Scissors – This will depend on the age of your kids, but my big girl loves to cut things out. When she was really young, she used a pair of plastic scissors but now she uses real scissors with the rounded edges for safety.
• Markers – I’ve been known to mutter something about throwing all our markers out because I get frustrated when I find caps lying around or when they decide to start drawing on each other (!) but kids love markers. These days, we really like the ones that have a regular marker tip on one end and a little stamp shape on the other (though that means TWO caps on each marker to lose, augh!).
• Paint – Some people really like watercolors in those little boxes with ten circles of color. I’m not crazy about them because they get all messed up and rarely paint all that well, so we get non-toxic tempera paint. I keep little plastic containers, like the ones that sour cream comes in, and use it for water to rinse the brushes, and I use aluminum pie plates to squirt out a few colors. Then I just spread old newspaper out, put an old shirt on each of my kids, and let them go to town.
• Pipe Cleaners – These are fun because they’re easy to twist into a variety of shapes and can be used to enhance other crafts (antennae for bugs!).
• Old magazines, fliers, etc. – These are a lot of fun for making collages. Your child can cut out and glue furniture pictures on a paper to make a paper doll’s room, or cut out features from different people to make a funny face collage.
• Popsicle sticks – These are versatile. Not only can you make the standard popsicle stick house or raft, they make excellent handles for paper puppets or Mardi-Gras style masks.
• Random things around the house – Paper plates (glue the aforementioned face pieces to make a mask!), paper muffin cups, aluminum foil, wax paper, string, yarn, egg cartons, empty toilet paper/paper towel rolls, and more. Use your imagination or better yet, let your child use theirs. Some of the most interesting things my big girl has created have come from random bits of household objects that she did completely on her own.

You can go ahead and spend a lot of money for name brand craft supplies if you’d like, but we get just about everything for our kids’ craft box at the Dollar Store. It’s more affordable, and it has a huge aisle full of fun stuff that will make your craft box inviting for your child’s creativity.

Have fun!