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. The sky is the limit, and crafts made from the same kit can be kept simple, or they can be made as intricate as the artist desires.
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: Handcrafted Slippers!
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. Every Crate is a project and a lesson in technique – when your are finished, you should have a usable hand-made item and a new skill.
It’s loaded with high-quality pictures and illustrations to both give you ideas and help you along, and they produce a video tutorial for each project, too. Doodle Crate is great at providing perspective and inspiration for their projects, showing examples of the medium in real life settings.
The booklet proceeds step-by-step, from start to finish, with detailed guidance the whole way. The numerous diagrams explain every step clearly and make it practically impossible to go off track. At every phase of the project, Doodle Crate presents several options to bring added personality to your work – and you are always free to do something completely original. After all, it is YOUR creation.
The guidance is always thorough enough to allow you to create a polished looking piece. Tips are provided on making animals, scenes, or drawn decorations, with your slippers either matching or complementary in design.
Handy tips are located throughout the instructions.
This Crate is suitable for a wide range of ages, and older kids and adults can bring as much complexity to their projects as they want.
My daughter is a big “researcher,” and she likes to digest all of the background materials before getting started.
The kit included multiple sizes of templates, allowing you pick the one that best fits your feet (and they included instructions on measuring you feet, too).
The templates even included markings showing where to sew the pieces together, avoiding the issue of unevenly or improperly spaced lacing.
Small, self-adhesive felt was provided for decorating the slippers. Both blue and gray felt was provided for the body of the slippers, with black, yellow, and green decorations available in multiple shapes.
My daughter wanted to do a happy cat, but this first try looked like it had a tummy ache.
A rearranging of the mouth helped sort it out.
The Crate included plenty of self-adhesive felt to cut out for decorations, plus many pre-cut circles and triangles for ears, eyes, etc.
The finishing touch is a pair of Doodle Crate fabric stickers.
Our daughter had a great time with this project, and she did a great job with the stitching. Doodle Crate is a really great project subscription for tweens, teens, and even adults. Some projects can get fairly complex, but the thorough instructions and guidance never leave us confused, and most projects can be done by pre-teens without adult assistance. This project was trickier than it appears – despite having templates for the cloth and guides for stitching, it was still tough to get the two slippers perfectly symmetrical. Most Doodle Crate projects create objet d’art, so they are sufficient durable to display for years. Footwear absorbs alot of punishment, and I wouldn’t expect the simple felt and foam construction to last as long as the display pieces. Still, they were fun to make and very cute!
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