The Art of Friendship! (Crayola Friendship Bracelets)

Member Name: kingfisher111

Product:	Crayola Friendship Bracelets
Date:	30/08/08 (256 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: lovely bracelets to make

Disadvantages: too fidly, poor instructions, suggested age is too low

My daughter was given this lovely looking pack which supplies everything that you need to make a number of friendship bracelets for her 5th birthday. It is made by Crayola who generally produce good quality art kits for small children and this seemed to be another good idea from them!

The kit contains everything that you need to make six different bracelets. In order to make these there is cotton, ribbons, assorted colours of plastic beads and some pink foam flowers. In fact when you open up the box it really does look like an Aladdin's Cave and my daughter's eyes really lit up when she saw everything that was in there.

There is a little leaflet which provides all the instructions for the different bracelets. This is a bit disappointing as it's in really small print in six different languages and the wording used is not exactly child friendly. This means that for most children they will need help interpreting these from an adult. There are a couple of diagrams but I do think that these could have been made a lot more child friendly by the use of lots of pictures showing exactly what you need to do. Considering this kit is suggested for the ages of five upwards, a lot of little girls making these will only just be starting to read.

There are six different bracelets you can make and these are:

two ribbon knot bracelet
thread bracelet
foam flower bracelet
bead bracelets
wrap around bracelet
and threaded knot bracelet.

It would have been useful if these had been graded by their level of difficulty so we knew which one would be an easier one to try first, so I think Crayola missed a trick here. As it was I just asked my daughter which one she liked the sound of and unsurprisingly she opted for the foam flower bracelet - well the foam flowers were pink!

I wished that the materials needed were listed at the top of the instructions but they were not but we soon sorted out the ribbon and flowers needed. We then had a go at making the bracelet and believe me it was very fiddly. The pink flowers have two slits in the foam and you are supposed to be able to thread the ribbon through these. Well, with my daughter's little fingers she found it impossible and I found my larger hands to be not much better either! I really felt that we should have been supplied with some sort of threading device and in the end I improvised by threading the ribbon through the largest darning needle I could find and using that! Even then it was quite difficult and even though by the end of it my daughter had a very pretty friendship bracelet neither of us found the process of making it very enjoyable. This was very disappointing because surely the making of these things is what it's all about!

We have now decided to put the rest of the kit away until my daughter is a bit older and she is more able to make the bracelets by herself. I'm always happy to help her but she is a fiercely independent soul and now that she is five she really wants to have a go without mummy's help!

I often find with Crayola products that the suggested starting age is a bit too low and I definitely feel that is the case for this friendship bracelet kit. I think age 8 would be a much better age for working on this and even going up as far as about twelve. That way the whole process would be a lot more enjoyable.

So overall, this is a disappointing kit because although the ideas and the outcomes are lovely, the age range is wrong, the instructions are difficult and there really ought to be something to help you thread the very small bits on. As I said, it's going back in the cupboard and we'll get it out in a few years time when hopefully it will be more successful!

Summary: A graet idea but could be better!