Doodle Crate Subscription Box Review & Coupon –

September’s Doodle Crate was Paper Mache Animal Masks!  Doodle Crate is one of the latest additions to the KiwiCo family. Geared toward kids 9+, it inspires young makers to learn new skills and gain creative confidence through craft and art projects. This box is also excellent for anyone wanting a craft subscription (even adults). It’s not just another craft project every month – it’s a whole new technique. In my experience, this is the best “arts and crafts” box for older kids, tweens, teens, and adults.

The box includes an information booklet that gives a great overview of the technique to be learned — this month’s technique is paper mache.

It comes with everything you need to complete the project (except some very basic household supplies).  For this project, I grabbed an extra (finer) brush, scissors, a couple medium-sized bowls, masking tape, plastic wrap, and a piece of cardboard to work over — everything else was included.

The booklet has some great background info on the history and purpose of the masks.  Doodle Crate is great at giving some perspective and inspiration for their projects.

The instructions are clear and easy to follow and broken down step by step.  Extension ideas are included with the instructions when there is room (it depends on the project).  This project was very simple to do — the only thing to watch out for was the potential for creating a big mess (the instructions did warn about this, suggesting you keep a trash can very handy at certain stages)!

The construction materials provided for the mask.  The pre-powdered gauze is a vast improvement over self-mixing.

The decorative materials for the mask.  The paint choices are a little limiting.  Most animals are some specie of brown, so that (or a blue for mixing) would have really opened up options.

Unfortunately, this craft was prohibitively messy from the standpoint of taking photos in-process.  It was extremely simple, though, and lots of fun.

We chose to do a wolf, so we made the cheeks a little higher and made a custom shape for the nose out of the tinfoil.  Lots of foil was provided with the kit, so we were able to do a lot in the way of building out the mask without having to add any extra materials.

Our mask turned out fantastic!  There was a lot of paper mache included in the kit, so it is pretty thick and durable.  This was a fun, classic art-class craft — simplified and finally de-messified enough to do at home!

Ring-ding-ding-ding-dingeringeding!

Visit Doodle Crate to subscribe or find out more! Save 30% on your first month with coupon code MS30  (or Kiwi Crate  and the KiwiCo family subscriptions Tinker Crate and Koala Crate).

Here’s a peek at some of the stuff we may see from future crates! (screenprinting, make your own camera)