When my 5 year old daughter had her birthday party last year people asked what she would like as gifts. I stupidly said the same thing to everyone - "craft kits". The result was we ended up with around 30 different girlie craft kits and are still only really scratching the surface of them now nearly a year on! With all the after school activities, relaxing weekends and time visiting friends and family it is very difficult to find an hour or so of dedicated time to sit down, without her 2 year old sister, and do a good craft kit with my eldest.

One we tried recently was the Crayloa Friendship Bracelet kit. I believe it retails under £5 and to be honest it shows in the quality of the kit. It contains 1 long length of elastic cord, several very long skeins of coloured thread and 2 strips of ribbon. The box also contains 2 packs of sweet, pastel coloured beads and an instruction booklet. This was my biggest bug bear - for a kit aimed at 5+ the instruction booklet was pretty useless. It was simple and step by step but the methods used to make some of the different types of bracelet were very fiddly for much small fingers, and my daughter (and !) quickly got frustrated.

The booklets suggests all manner of ways of creating the pretty bracelets - winding thread around other threads, knotting the ribbon and all kind of knots that presumably only sailors know how to do!

In the end we ended up just using the beads, along with some of the beads in our own stockpile, along with thee elastic to make some simple bead bracelets. I am sure this is not how the kit was meant to be used, but it was just too fiddly for us.

In summary, a nice inexpensive kit if you need to stock up on beads and elastic, but unless your child is a bit older they may not actually find the friendship bracelet making part of the kit that simple to do.