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Flair Feltastic Peppa Pig
by MrsD76
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Bacon sarnie anyone?
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My little girl, who is nearly four, became a bit obsessed with Peppa Pig about a year ago. It got to the point where I was totally sick of Peppa, and every time I saw it I felt that the only good thing that could happen to Peppa and her family was that they would be made ... into a nice big pile of bacon sandwiches.
Thankfully I think I have managed to wean my daughter off watching the TV programmes, but I did spot this set in my local charity shop recently for just £1.50 and decided to buy it for her, hoping she could get her Peppa fix this way instead!
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Fuzzy and fun
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I loved Fuzzy Felt sets when I was little, so I thought this would be good fun for her. And one of the reasons this appealed to me is that there are a lot of bits in the pack. The main item is of course the board where you stick the smaller pieces. The board is a good size and is mainly blue, for the sky, with a green hill at the bottom. This is the perfect place for Peppa's house which is also included.
Other felt pieces in the set include Peppa and her family in their car, as well as individual pieces featuring the four main characters from the show - Peppa's little brother George, mummy pig, daddy pig, and of course Peppa herself - jumping in muddy puddles. There are also extra Peppa and George pieces with them on bikes and playing. There are clouds and a sun for the sky, as well as a few much smaller pieces of felt featuring a few toys and other things. As there are such a lot of pieces you can make lots of different scenes simply by placing the felt images onto the board, where they will stick nicely - it is like a very gentle Velcro affect! All the pieces are very bold and brightly coloured, just as in the programme and all the images depicted are very faithful to those you see on the TV. So if your child is familiar with the programme they will easily recognise the different characters.
And the whole lot comes in a sturdy plastic envelope, with a handle at the top, so it is nice and easy to keep this all together and store it all away when you are done with it.
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Peppa scenes
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My little girl really enjoys playing with this, and she loves creating different scenes and making the characters have conversations with each other. A lot of the pieces are quite large, so you couldn't possibly fit all of them onto the board at once (unless you made it into a real jumble), but this means you can play around with the pieces to create an array of different scenes. As the pictures are exactly as they are in the programme it is lots of fun for a Peppa fan and my daughter certainly enjoys playing with her set.
However I do wish I had got hold of one of these sooner, as I can definitely see her starting to lose interest in this quite soon. There is just not enough to do here to keep her interested for long periods of time and I think she will be a bit too old for it soon. So I would definitely recommend this for Peppa fans who are about 3, as I think this is just the right age to get maximum fun from the set!
Looking online I think this may be a bit tricky to get hold of now, although there do seem to be loads on ebay and, as I say I found this in my local charity shop. So I am sure if you are interested you will be able to get your hands on a set!
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Flair Aqua Beads Starter Set
by abbadabbado
Each and every time the advert for Aqua Beads appeared on the TV, my soon to be five year old daughter was begging me for a set. "Look at what I could make" she would cry.
When my older daughter was young, there was nothing on the market to resemble Aqua Beads. I immediately liked the concept of being able to use water to ... stick beads together, so we researched the best set to get her started with once her birthday rolled around.
For £9.99 we bought the starter set which contains over 800 beads. This price is fairly stable wherever you look, but it is usually found in the two for £15 from Argos which makes it slightly better value.
Inside the set as previously mentioned were a large amount of beads all packaged nicely according to their colour. There was a good colour range included. Also in the box was a plastic compartment box with a lid, which although looks quite flimsy has done a good job of housing the beads. A small plastic bottle with nozzle acts as the spray bottle. This could actually double as a small perfume bottle in little girls craft sets, but it's a decent size for an adult to use, but perhaps a little small for children to grip and be able to use properly one handed. The bead tool however is a different story being a nice size to fit smaller hands.
No craft set would be complete without the standard templates. We were given four different ideas sheets which fit snugly into the bead board. I thought this was a nice idea, as the templates were in full colour and made using the correct size circles to fit the bead size perfectly. So often in sets, templates are an afterthought and don't really fit the set they are packaged with, so a bit plus for Flair, the maker of the set.
Obviously my daughter was eager to get started so she sectioned off the beads into the plastic compartment box. Immediately I could see the small plastic beads being lost quite quickly, and this would be the one downfall to the set. Like many smaller children, girls especially when they start playing with beads etc., you invariably hear the familiar "ting ting ting" if you have laminate floor as one or three drop from the table to the floor. The hoover will often be heard collecting stray beads from under the front of the sofa or table.
Once our beads were sorted into colours, we set up the bead board and worked out how the tool worked. The board is made of clear plastic sitting in a pink tray. This is a good fit and there is space to remove the clear board and place a template underneath. A couple of grooves on the templates and plastic board enable everything to stay in place quite nicely.
The board itself has small bead like grooves which the beads nestle into when they are placed on the board. If you imagine an old fashioned solitaire board with the larger dips, then this is a much smaller version.
The next step is to use the bead tool which is essentially a fat plastic pen with a hole instead of a nib. The top part of the tool is pink coloured plastic and serves no purpose other than to be held comfortably. The base of the tool is clear and shows when you have managed to place a bead into the hole. This is done by pressing lightly down into the beads until one pops into the tool. It's a very easy process but children do have to remember not to press too hard otherwise the beads tend to splay out everywhere.
To get the bead from the tool onto the board, there is a small button that acts as a release when the tool is above the board. We learnt very quickly here that the tool has to be quite close to where you want the bead to fall as it can jump into the wrong groove very easily.
Some practice is needed for first time Aqua Bead users to master the technique, but once mastered, it's a very easy and quick process to create a design.
The main negative part of the tool is that it will only hold one bead at a time. There are other sets on the market that hold multiple beads, but not the starter set which is a shame.
Once your design is in place, the time has come for it to be glued together with water. A spray of water will create a sticky substance from the beads which sets the design in place.
I researched how this happened and essentially the beads are made from PVA based glue that is activated when it comes into contact with water.
The instructions told us that the design will take approximately an hour to "set" once sprayed. With only one board included in the starter set this meant that once a design was completed the toy had to go away until it was ready to be removed from the board. This was a bit of a disappointment to an excited five year old who wanted to carry on creating.
After the required time limit we learnt a couple of really valuable lessons. Make sure the water has been sprayed evenly over the beads, and make sure your design is thick enough to withstand someone lifting off the board.
It would appear that sometimes the designs need longer than the required hour to set. I started encouraging my daughter to leave them overnight to give them a good chance to set properly.
Overall I think this set is good value for money. It's a good concept that is safe for children. Obviously the beads are minute and need supervision around children. I think the design could do with some tweaks to make it more user friendly and replacement beads and parts should be made more readily available as they aren't at the moment.
It is however a good present for a crafty child and one that has definitely proved its worth in our house.
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Gelarti Designer Studio
by emmad5689
My eldest daughter loves to be creative so before her birthday I searched through the arts section of Amazon and found this set which I thought she would love. The set can be bought in other shops such as Toys r Us, from Amazon it cost me just over £15 although the actual RRP is £19.99.
The set came packaged in a white box ... which was shaped like a octagon accept the four straight lengths were longer than the four diagonal pieces. The box was white in colour and showed lots of brightly coloured stickers on it and of the course the name of the product. Inside the box the set was held in by cable ties and sellotape and the box ended up ruined trying to get it out.
The set comprises of a bright pink and blue case with a brightly coloured Gelarti sticker across the front of it. The case doesn't fasten at all and on opening you find there are four holes along the back of it to put in the gel pens and there is a bright green area for your child to colour the stickers. The green area has a square indentation on it which is the exact fit square for the sticker sheets and the area is like a turntable to make it easier for your child to colour the stickers without leaning over and smudging their work.
There are four gel pens with the set, I call then pens quite loosely as they are made of see through plastic and are in the shaped like a flame and have a solid colour nozzle on the end to match the colour of the gel inside. In the set you get a orange, blue, green and red and they have a glittery effect in the gel too. The pens aren't great, when they are full they sort of splodge out and you get too much gel, the lids don't stay on and when you turn to tighten the lids they just keep turning. The pens don't stand in the holes they are meant to and when the case is closed they often fall out and finally the nozzles get clogged with the gel and you have to use a needle to free them up whenever your child wants to use them.
The stickers are different depending on which set you buy, the starter set which is what we bought comes with six sheets of stickers to be coloured, the sheets are probably about 3.5 inches square so there are only a couple of stickers per sheet. The stickers with this set are everyday things such as a cat, stars, clouds, flowers and the outlines are in thick black lines which are raised to help the gel stay in the right place.
The set also copmes with a packet of what they call gems but I call shaped plastic pieces, we had no idea what we were supposed to do with these and there was no indication what they were supposed to do or even if they would be held on the stickers with the gels so we have stuck them in Sophie's arts and crafts box to be used with other things.
By now I would think you will realise I was certainly not impressed with the set. When Sophie got the set for her birthday she wanted to play with it so we set it up and showed her how to gently press on the plastic pens to get the gel to come out however no matter how gently we pressed it came out in splodges and the first set of stickers she tried to colour had to be washed before the gel set. We tried again and she did manage to colour a couple of the sheets of the stickers but considering she is quite a neat colourer for her age these ended up quite messy. The stickers then take up to 24 hours to dry so of course she then lost interest as for a 5 year old to wait that length of time seems like an eternity.
Once dried the stickers can be peeled off the sheet and stuck on items around the house and they will peel back off without leaving any residue and can be stuck around again, at first Sophie thought it was great but again she quickly lost interest when the stickers began not to stick on very easily.
The second time we got the set out for Sophie to play with the nozzles were all stuck up and by the time I had found a needle and cleared them all out she had found something else to play with and the set has never been got out again.
It is advised that this set is not for under 3's due to small parts on Amazon but the box states on it this set is for age 5 plus which is the age of my daughter. I think this set is poor as the case doesn't fasten, the pens fall out of their holes, the nozzles clog, the gels don't come out easily and you have to wait too long for the gels to dry to be able to use the stickers. The idea is good as you can use a tool included to make a marbling effect on the stickers and you can get some nice results. Sophie is not impressed with this and like I say she has played with it properly once so she is obviously not impressed.
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