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: FOAM PRINT MAKING!
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.
Handy tips are located throughout the instructions, and they always include some options for customizing your work using alternate techniques or additional details.
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 saw the baby unicorn suggested as one option for the speech-bubble shaped foam template and immediately got to work.
The foam was easy to carve using just a pen.
The Crate included several shaped templates, plus several sheets to make designs of your own.
There were lots of suggestions for customizing your work. Here, my daughter made a template to place a background pattern behind her main stamp.
Here, she used the stamp directly on the paper to decorate.
The kit included four different colors of ink pad, plus cards for turning some of your finished prints into greeting cards.
She had a great time experimenting with ombre and shading techniques.
Some were more successful than others (these were all great!!). The Crate included a big stack of cards, so there was plenty of room to experiment and try different things.
We have a stack of prints that we have attached to the included cards to make homemade greeting cards, or we can cut them out to make a collage or our very own bookmarks.
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 very accessible for kids on the younger end of the suggested age range, but there was also a lot of room to grow in mastering the technique and creating your own variations.
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