Vendor Spotlight and GIVEAWAY: Arterro Kits (2 of 2)

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Reported by Susie Ziegler

My 10-year-old daughter and I were excited to play with craft kits from Arterro. Kits are a great introduction to a new craft without requiring a large investment in materials. She and I have tried a lot of kits in our time and often find that many popular ones for kids are so heavily packaged and prepared it isn't nearly as fun to make the items as we expect.

What a breath of fresh air to receive Arterro kits! Kits with open ended purpose! We can immerse ourselves in the process with their high quality, sustainable materials. We worked with their new Paint With Wool Portrait Kit:
and the Collage Jewelry Kit:

First we tried needle felting with the Wool Portrait Kit. It contains four, high quality, thick 4-inch wool squares, an array of wool roving in rainbow colors, and three sturdy needle felting needles. Needle felting needles are long and sharp with little barbs to grab wool fibers and lock them together.


The package contains enough instructions and ideas to encourages us to explore the materials and plan our compositions.

Forget planning, Mom. I like this color and I'm getting started!

My daughter used a foam pad as a base that I had around the house. I used a rolled up towel as suggested in our instructions.

"Sweetie, you are using all the color, you have to pull off small pieces of the wool so I can have some." We agreed that the colors of wool are beautiful. Although there isn't a large amount of each color, we had plenty for our little wool portraits.

We loved needle felting with these materials. My daughter observed, "This would be fun to do with the Girl Scouts!" We also had an, "Oops! I poked a finger. Ouch!" No harm done, though. She wrapped her finger in a bandage and got right back to work.


It was a dark snowy Saturday, and we were still feeling creative, so we got started on some collage jewelry. This kit contains glaze, a paintbrush, decorative decoupage papers in patterns, tissue paper solids, assorted glass and wooden beads, twine and jewelry findings, and one large wooden bangle.

This time we took a little more time to plan our designs.

At first I didn't realize the white goo in the pot was a finishing glaze and not the sticky medium. We mixed up a separate little bowl of our own watered down Elmers glue to stick our collage paper to the wood beads.


Again, the papers were beautiful designs and were fun to work with.

Jewelry findings were included in the kit, as were simple instructions to tie the beads to earring wire with the twine.

Pros:

• Materials are sustainable and natural
• Appealing collections of creative supplies
• Fun for all ages, not just kids
  
• Enough materials for multiple finished items

Con:

• We already want to replenish our supplies, especially the thick white wool base material for the needle felting. Arterro only offers craft kits and not extra supplies.

We had a very creative afternoon and my daughter has learned two new crafts she can do herself when she is feeling an urge to make something.

Give these kits a try. We had a great time with them!




GIVEAWAY!
Our friends at Artterro are giving away a kit of the winner's choice to two of our lucky readers! Answer the following question in the comments section to be entered:

Artterro already has all of these kits to choose from... what ideas do you have for new kits?

Comment by Saturday, February 26, 2011 at 9 pm CST to be entered. One comment per article, please.

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