Doodle Crate is a member of the KiwiCo family geared toward kids 9+. It inspires young makers to learn new skills and gain creative confidence through craft and art projects by teaching them basic and intermediate techniques of a new artistic medium each month.
Though geared toward kids, Doodle Crate is gender neutral and also excellent for anyone (even adults) wanting a craft subscription. In our experience, this is the best “arts and crafts” box for older kids, tweens, teens, and adults – the end result is nearly always something you will want to save!
This month’s project: Fortune Telling Machine!
DEAL: Use this link to save 30% on your first month of Doodle Crate! (or Kiwi Crate and the KiwiCo family subscriptions Tinker Crate and Koala Crate).
Every crate comes with everything you need to complete the project (except for a few basic items from your home), as well as a booklet. Doodle Crate tends to focus on a single craft and contains only what you’ll need for the project.
The booklet has excellent, textbook quality background on the subject matter of the project. It’s loaded with high-quality pictures and illustrations to both give you ideas and help you along. Doodle Crate is great at providing perspective and inspiration for their projects.
The booklet walks through the project step-by-step in great detail. The first half of this craft was constructing a dispenser for the fortunes. Our daughter is slightly younger than the suggested age range for this box, but she was able to put together the dispenser without any assistance.
The second part of the project was making the individual fortunes to go in the machine. To make them look really great, the kit included a calligraphy pen and guidance on making impressive lettering.
I addition to instructions on forming the letters and manipulating the proportions of the script, the booklet also contained a practice page.
Our daughter did pretty well for an eight-year-old – she even added some fancy flourishes to her writing!
What an awesome completed project! We found her a few days after learning lettering attempting large instagram-like script for her name. So awesome she started applying this new technique right away!
The mechanism is easy to operate – here our two-year-old is raiding the fortunes! The wood construction makes it suitable for keeping around for awhile – you could even paint it to create a more impressive piece.
Doodle Crate is a really great project subscription for tweens, teens, and even adults. The thorough instructions and guidance never leave us confused, and most projects can be done by pre-teens without adult assistance. We really like the quality and lasting nature of the crafts – this project held our kids’ attention for several days, and that was definitely worth the price of the box!
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