Atlas Insider
Atlas Insider: Outsider
Gosh I love being at MDK World Headquarters in Nashville. Thanks to Covid vaccines, I’ve gotten to go there five whole times this year, in stark contrast to the very remote Remote Working Situation we had in 2020. It’s hard to believe that the team moved the whole business—bag, baggage, and hundreds of bins of yarn—from Taylor Street to Atlas Drive in 2020, and I did not even get my hands dirty.
When I do get to Nashville, I’m a bit of a chaos agent. I want everybody to stop working and hang out with me. What’s all this yarn laid out on my so-called desk? What does a person have to do to get a power outlet around here? Are there any new snacks in the kitchen? And could somebody show me (again) how to work the new-fangled (or is it old-fangled) coffee machine? How are all the pets? Is that a new outfit? Where are we going for lunch? Can I get some [yarn] [tools] [bags] [scissors] to take home with me?
There is one Atlas Amenity I miss the most when I’m not there: the team craft table. I am wistful about all the window stars being made without me, all the stickers being stuck, all the woolly creatures being needle felted. And don’t get me started on the potholder weaving—it’s too much fun.
If I lived in Nashville, I would be queen of the craft table. It would be like my Camp Fire Girls group at Mrs. Jensen’s house all over again: we’d be blowing the insides out of eggs for pysanky, sculpting with sugar, making gum-wrapper chains . . . The Mod Podge would flow like a mighty, sticky river. We would decoupage all the things.
Back when I was practicing law, I dreamed of keeping a community knitting project in a basket on my desk, with needles and yarn. When people dropped in to talk over their discovery strategy or complain about their caseload, they could pick it up and add a few rows of garter stitch, just to take the edge off, turning litigation anxiety into a scrappy scarf.
So to think that there is a whole table dedicated to crafting at my place of work, and I’m rarely there to enjoy it—it’s hard.
I tell you what, though: I’ll be back. And I’ve been saving gum wrappers.
A Giveaway
The prize? A Woolly Creature Felting Kit—enter to win one for yourself. You could also snag one now as a gift and it ships free to U.S. addresses (free U.S. shipping on all orders $50+ until 11:59 p.m. tonight, December 12)!
How to enter?
Two steps:
Step 1: Sign up for our weekly newsletter, Snippets, right here. If you’re already subscribed, you’re set.
Step 2: Leave a comment telling us a favorite craft from your childhood. The weirder the better. Bonus points if the craft smells like Juicy Fruit and/or popsicles.
Deadline for entries: Sunday, December 19, 11:59 PM Central time. We’ll draw a random winner from the entries. Winner will be notified by email.
I can’t believe I’m making the first comment. I still haven’t adjusted to the time change. The craft I remember involves an empty thread spool. You put some nails in one end and pull string up through the hole and weave a cord. If you use different colors, it makes a design. I don’t remember the name of the craft, but it was fun.
Ooh! I came to post about that! I made many yards of it as a child. I bought a fancy manufactured one for my own children. It never caught on…must be that ‘a cardboard box is the best toy’ thingy. I should have stuck with the wood bobbin…but mine are all plastic,
that’s a Knitting Nancy!
Yes! At my elementary school, we called it “corking.” Some kids were patient enough to coil the little cylinders into mats and sew them together.a very few progressed to knitting. I have since wondered why only four nails and also if this led some clever woman to creating I-cord.
Beaded Dallas kits. Kind of like counted cross stitch with beads and sequins.
Potholders and embroider g dishcloths.
That was back when spools were made of wood and the hole seemed to be bigger?
Loved macrame. Would tie every string I found
Potholders, potholders, potholders. And lanyards made of gimp.
My mom called it spool knitting.
The weirdest craft I remember was carving potatoes and inking them to stamp. Maybe it was a Pennsylvania Dutch thing.
We still do that but I have to get wooden spools from the flea market. Looks like I cord.
My favorite craft was to join my dad in his wood shop, he is a woodworker, and I would make sculptures with the scrap wood. The one I remember and wish I still had was like an early version of a charcuterie board….it was a loaf of bread made using half circles and then various other scraps for cheese and meat. It’s probably far grander in my head than it was in real life!
Oh how i loved getting a craft kit for Christmas when i was young. Christmas doesn’t feel the same without them and I’ve given up giving them to my children – though i did have fun doing them myself at Easter.
The weirdest one i got – which i LOVED – was a kit to make your own clear plastic paperweight. The chemicals were probably very poisonous but i still have the half dome of magical clear ‘glass’ with a dried flower immortalised within – with its own special eternal bubble hidden in the petals.
Carving a design into a crumbly art eraser and then stamping said design on newsprint. I still have a memento box crafted from a cigar box wrapped in stamped newspaper. So edgy.
I loved making little TV sets out of boxes, paper towel tubes, and paper that I taped together in long strips. They were kind of a riff on the old Fisher Price wind-up tvs with the lenticular scrolling scenes. I also would raid the house for little boxes and objects that I could convert into Barbie furniture. Jello boxes and magazine pictures made the best little televisions, (I seem to have been a very tv forward kid-it was the 70’s!) but my mom was never thrilled that she would be left with unidentified jello pouches in the pantry.
Spool knitting
I would collect my Mom’s old magazines, cut up pictures to make tiny colored pieces then glue them down to make pictures. I was quite ambitious and made a really nice peacock.
Paper mache on balloons. I don’t remember what we did with the resulting hollow balls but I loved doing it. Flour and water paste!
I made tons of potholders and sold them in my neighborhood. I also crocheted Barbie doll outfits.
Spool knitting, making ink stamps out of potatoes, gum-wrapper chains
My cousin and I made cotton woven potholders by the dozens!
I would use the heavy piece of white paper that came in men’s shirts. I would use old crayons with lots of colors and scribble and cover the whole paper. Then you covered that with black crayon. Finally you used a stick or scissors and etch a design or picture.
Oh so many crafts & I think I’ve done them all as above comments are a trip down memory lane.
A cherished one I have is a basket that I wove at summer camp when I was ten & one of the few crafty camper who actually finished one.
The weird part I guess, is it is still in use today as a bread basket 65 years later.
Hollowing out eggs, gum wrapper chains! Those were the days, Kay! I still remember the thrill of finding out the proper way to position the folded wrapper when adding it to the chain, and the scrambled eggs after blowing them out of the shells. As fir drop by crafting, a classmate of mine in O.T. school who dormed had extra hooks so that when folks dropped by her room to watch TV, they also worked on the rug hooking project that she and her fiance had purchased for their future home. They certainly were all good times. Also good is that when in Nashville, you’ve got a place to go. Up here, I am still missing my knitting group which broke up after the leader moved out of state. Good that MDK remains a knitting constant in this world.
As kids we used to decorate styrofoam balls with sequins, beads, ric rac, etc for the Christmas tree. We loved it. I also made all of my doll clothes out of leftover materials from my Mom’s sewing stash.
I don’t recall any weird crafts. I think I went from macaroni art to embroidery.
Loved macaroni art. Cover a coffee can or styrofoam wreath. Cover in silver spray paint. So fancy.
I loved macaroni art. I have a secret dream of covering the walls in my bathroom with glued on macaroni and spray painting the whole place gold.
Lanyards. I used to work on them while sitting on the bench waiting for my turn at handball. That skill morphed into friendship bracelets, much to the delight of family members who tried of having various lanyards attached to everything.
Oh, the memories of childhood crafting. I remember, fondly, paint by numbers. Always a special surprise when I received one. Lanyard making and gum wrapper chains and tasty fruit loops necklaces.
Making potholders
Growing up in a Danish household – after immigrating in 1959 with my parents and baby brother – we used to make these cute little red and white woven paper hearts that would be hung on the Christmas tree and filled with raisins, nuts and m&ms. I recall the m&ms disappeared rather quickly somehow and the raisins and nuts remained! I LOVED making those hearts. Now my daughter makes them in her home.
My favorite craft was “yo-yos.” Not the plastic kind on a string but the round circles of cloth that were folded and stitched around the edges and eventually joined together with thousands of other yo-yos to make vests, and throws and such. It wasn’t that I loved the yo-yos so much as making them once a year with my favorite aunt who would come to visit during the summer. Such treasured memories of time spent with one of my favorite people!
When I was a kid, we did bread dough art. Mom made the bread dough from white bread and white glue. Then all of us would make all kinds of animals, flowers, or what ever. My dad painted flowers on wood and then would add the bread dough flowers he made for a 3d effect.
I loved paper mache. I remember making a horse for my sister out of toilet paper rolls cut up and newspaper. I think it was the goopy feeling of the flour and water paste that I liked!
I got a rock polisher for my birthday one year, it made a racket, but I loved it and made lots of heavy jewelry and my mom kept the earrings I made her for years.
I was given a kit to make shell jewelry as a pre-teen. I got glue everywhere, made some truly lurid versions of shell flowers and had a wonderful time! I’ve long since abandoned that for many varieties of embroidery, sewing and quilting, clay and now I concentrate on yarn.
We used to make tinfoil boats for caterpillars to sail in puddles – not sure they enjoyed the trips 🙂 and of course endless gimp lanyards and bracelets
I did that, too! But for ants.
In grade 8 we glued different shapes of pasta (I wouldn’t have called it pasta then, only macaroni or spaghetti) onto small cardboard boxes, then spray painted them gold or silver. I guess the only reason I still remember it is because our teacher, Mrs. Steinbeck, said mine was quite nice. Looking back on it now, I think it wasn’t a very inspiring craft for a 13 year old, but yet I still remember it 60+ years on.
We had to do that in 9th grade home ec. The macaroni was glued to a coffee can and then spray painted gold. We then had to bake cookies which went into our cans. We were to give them as a Christmas gift.
I loved making embroidery floss bracelets and also building houses out of popsicle sticks. Gum wrapper chains were always made on our road trip holidays, and as a family of 7 it was amazing how long we could make them!
Check out you tube for the guy with the Guinness world record gum wrapper chain. He has been working on it since the 1960s!!!!
Not so weird but as a kid I had a potholder loom and I made potholders for anybody in the extended family who cooks. My mom and aunt still have theirs all these 50ish years later. When I saw them advertised again recently, I asked my mom about it and she laughed and said it was probably somewhere in the house still. I decided to start fresh, filled out the MDK order form, handed it to hubby and told him to fill out credit card info to get me a little something for my birthday. It came yesterday! Lol.
I was a fan of any craft involving scotch tape. Wrapping presents was awesome, but I really used tape on everything
Tie dye parties, potholders, sculpy ornaments, macramé. My mom loved all crafts and introduced us to all sorts.
My sister and I always got craft kits at Christmastime. We painted wooden ornaments and ceramic figurines, baked in our easy bake oven,wove potholders and did a lot of wood burning and leathercrafts Most fun was the time we got a Thingmaker to cook up plastic bugs. The smell of cooking plastic….yum! Probably made toxic vapors….but we survived!
I bought one of those with my BF the year after I graduated from college. Bugs, dinosaurs…skulls, maybe? We really liked dinosaurs. We also made balsa wood dinosaur models. And that’s just a young adult craft…
The strangest craft I did was trying to make Pooh characters out of felt in second grade, because I’d found some book in the class library. I did Tigger and Eeyore, and they never looked right.
oh yes!!!! I didn’t read your comment before posting- so I too have this smell memory!!!! I think that’s why mom finally sent it off to wherever… or the plastic ran out.
And some of the liquid plastic would glow in the dark. Probably radioactive….lol
I remember Thingmakers! Those fun wiggly rubbery spiders and centipedes
I can still remember the smell!
of course I made pot holders as a kid, but then you mentioned weird… so not sure if this qualifies but a friend & I would spend lots of time w/ our magnets in the sand in the gutters gathering tiny bits of iron filings then make our own magic pictures under glass. I’m old enough to qualify as this being before the ‘real’ magic slates…
I miss craft circles this year as well with all the creative juices in full flow!
I did tons of crafts as a child and one thing I dabbled in was wood burning. That smell as you used a solder gun type of thingy on soft wood to burn in a pattern.
Did not really appreciate all the craft time then but it did develop my creative side that I now love.
Gimp lanyards and bracelets and I still have one of my favorites.
My Girl Scout troop wove “Sit Upons” in summer day camp. They were made of 2 inch wide folded newspaper strips woven like a big potholder in about a 24 inch square. I think we stapled the ends to hold the strips together. Fun!!
We made sit upons too! However, the absolute weirdest craft I remember involved rolling magazine pages into tight, very sturdy tubes on a diagonal. We cut the tubes to the proper size, then glued them to a big round cardboard chip container. Then we finished them by making a series of decorative loops on the top of the tubes with some weird plastic-covered cord. Viola! A “beautiful waste basket” for bedroom or bath! They were…yeah, I’m not sure there were words for them.
Gee, I’ve not thought of that for eons.
Egad! Now you have reminded me of the umbrella stand we made in Girl Scouts in about 1970. It was 3 or 4 coffee cans taped together, then wrapped with corrugated cardboard that someones parent donated to the troop. The whole thing was then spray painted and decorated in some horrific way. My mom used that masterpiece by the back door until she died in 2013. I threw it away with great relief.
I loved making these in my Girl Scout days, too!
Macrame! There was such a demand to make more and more plant hangers because every room of mine and my childhood friends’ homes had a handing plant and our family rooms had several—and watering all those plants was one of our weekly chores!
I thought it was clever to loop the brass ring hanger over my big toe to maintain the tension as I formed the macrame knots and it was fun shopping for the colorful large beads to incorporate into the designs.
Then I saved my allowance to pay for each mail subscription issue of TimeLife Family Craft series. Their book on macrame included a 3-D sculpture of a weeping willow forest embellished with a mythical forest gnome: macrame a flat rectangle for the forest ground, insert each long macrame strand down and up through the macramed forest floor to macrame the willow trunks upward, divide into branches and eventually leaving long tails of the natural jute to be unplied to create the weeping ends of the willow tree. The producing a 3-D sculpture in macrame seemed magical to my preteen self!
Wow. yes my mother and I did macrame together. Now that I am thinking we also did ceramics and I remember the exploding crystal that bled down. Those planters went into the macrame holders
I was really into making friendship bracelets as a kid and had a pretty epic embroidery floss stash. I also collected Breyer model horses, and participated in model horse shows. (Yeah, it’s a thing. That was my 4-H project for years.) I used the embroidery floss to make halters for my horses. But only for my drafters and Arabians, obviously.
(To continue the craft evolution, I also did origami and jewelry making as a child, and would make earrings and Christmas ornaments using both skills, then counted cross-stitch and embroidery as a teenager. I learned to knit at 18. Having found my One True Crafting Love, I never looked back.)
My mother believed in the power of incorporating art into everyday life. We made pot holders, took pottery lessons – hand building and wheel, seasonal crafts especially big at Christmas, and funny things Mom read about in the newspaper or a magazine. One summer we were given hammers, glue and wooden boards. We would smash the gravel in the driveway and glue the pieces to the wooden board. The gravel had muted muddy colors when whole. Smashing the individual pebbles resulted in sparkly beauties. When we tired if that, the next project was designing the dashboards for the go carts we were to build – again on a piece of wood. Fortunately for Mom, school started before it was time to build the go carts.
I belonged to the “Sea Rangers” when I was a kid (think of a nautical version of the Boy/Girl Scouts). One year we took the top and bottom off of coffee cans and wrapped them vertically (from top to bottom through the center) with red and green yarn to create Christmas card holders. Cards would be slipped behind each strand as they came in. They would fan out and the can would fill up over the season becoming a festive part of the decorations that sat on a table for people to pick up and read. This was a shift from the practice of taping the cards around door frames for all to enjoy by craning their necks!! So few hand written cards being sent these days. I must try to get some out myself!!
Shrinky dinks definitely!
Every Summer I was enrolled in a summer school class doing crafts and playing. I loved making potholders on those metal looms and gifting them to my mother for all her wonderful cooking. She would burn them, melt them and in general use them to death know she had an endless supply coming the next summer. Not to long ago I bought myself a new Metal loom and bags and bags of the loops needed to make a whole new collection.
Shrinky Dinks! Where you use markers to color clear plastic and then shrink it in the oven. Toxic fumes? Maybe. Hours of wondrous fun? Definitely.
Yes! Loved Shrinky Dinks. The smell and watching them shrink while hoping the curl would flatten out was always so exciting. Simple innocent pleasures or childhood.
Yes! Loved doing shrinky dinks! Turning the oven light on to watch them shrink down 🙂
This is too funny! I just had a conversation with my husband as I was heat setting gold foil caps on our newly bottled olive oil and said it reminded me of Shrinky Dinks!! He had no idea what I was talking about!! Then read this post. I loved/love all crafty projects and ultimately became a soft toy designer.
This is a trip down memory lane. We did shrinky dinks too. Thank you for the memory
Another Camp Fire Girl! I don’t think there are many of us around. Remember sewing on the beads we earned? But my favorite craft as a kid was actually knitting. My best friend and I would knit endless stocking caps trying to figure how to decrease so it would end up long and skinny enough.
I learned to knit when I was 10. It was weird to knit in Southeast Texas because cold weather was so rare. When my family started skiing in New Mexico at Christmas, I finally had a place to wear the hats and scarves that I made.
I hear you! I’m from Austin! Sadly, not much use for the quilts, afghans, blankets and hats I love to make!
Spool knitting! I’d forgotten about that until I read the comments- it made a long knitted tube. Potholders on the same type of metal loom I keep eyeing.
Snakies spool knitting, macrame
Paper mache.and finger painting when I was in school. I was not raised in a crafty household so there was not a lot of opportunity there.
Doesn’t seem like my embroidery floss friendship bracelets will win any points for weirdness – guess this is a common gateway to knitting. Maybe the most strange was a “salt dough” that my grandmother would make when we visited. We used it as a sort of a diy modeling clay. I think she intended the results to be for Christmas tree ornaments, but there wasn’t a thing I created that a puny pine branch could have supported…
Oh my word!! I loved that salt dough my grandmother made!!
My sister and I would spend hours coloring and cutting out paper dolls and costumes from “kit books” purchased at the Metropolitan Museum book store. A favorite was the Wives of King Henry VIII, it would take hours to color and we would carefully snip the edges with stork sewing scissors. We would dress them so carefully so the little tabs that held the clothing on wouldn’t fall off .
We always had a craft table set up in the basement. At Christmas we folded IBM cards to make holiday door wreaths. And always spray painted them gold. They were hand delivered to the nursing home where my grandma lived.
Haven’t thought about those in years!
yes! and then we made table “wreathes” out of the metal furnace filter parts that were flat with little circles cut out. We’d spray paint the metal gold and hang mini Christmas balls in each hole and bend the whole thing into a tall cylinder and put a pillar candle inside to reflect light when lit among all the little holes and glass balls. Weird that this IBM card door wreath triggered that memory too. Must have been around same time in the 70s.
Oh, my! I remember doing almost all of these crafts. My favorite was spending sewing time with my grams. She sewed to make money but she was also a quilter with her church group. I was very happy sewing together the scraps she would give me. I also remember making May baskets from paper that were held garden flowers and were left on neighbors doors. I am still a crafter, knitter, quilter, rug hooker, etc.
My aunt taught me how to knit when I was 8. Sorry it’s not weird!
Many summer days on the front porch making Troll houses out of shoe boxes. Cardboard furniture and pieces of fabric for curtains and rugs.
I taught myself garment construction by designing and hand-sewing clothes made from felt for my Troll dolls (circa 1965).
I made troll clothing and built them houses also! I’m definitely going down memory lane!
Macrame! I see someone else left that as their memorable craft. It’s coming back! I see elaborate wall hangings (like I did) but still haven’t seen a lamp shade like I did – very cool designed around an antique floor lamp. It was the request of an older cousin and may still be in use 40 years later!
My mom would take us to the store that sold ceramic bisque things. We got to pick one item and painted it when we got home. I still have the big letter D that i painted and hung in my childhood bedroom.
My mom and I would braid yarn in different colors to make ribbons for my hair. We used a three strand and four strand braid. Sometimes we would attach Pom poms to the ends to make them extra fun. Eventually, I figured that I could get some extra spending money by selling them to my friends.
There were two… making lanyards and making gum wrapper chains (which required me to chew a lot of Juicy Fruit gum, my favorite!) The theory was that the length of your gum wrapper chain designated the height of your husband-to-be. C’mon, we were just kids! I had several that were over 6 feet!
Many girls in my elementary school used gum wrapper chains as jump ropes!
I learned to knit and sew at about 6-7 so I have many memories with my mom doing those things. I also did cross tit h and embroidery.
Made a trivet by gluing little square tiles onto a round baloney tin. My mom used it for years. It didn’t seem weird at the time, but it sure seems weird now!
My Grandma showed me how to make Christmas trees by folding diagonal the pages of old Reader’s Digest magazines then paper clip front and back pages together and spray paint the whole thing silver or gold. They were beautiful!
Definitely a trip down memory lane but our trees were palm trees made from rolled, cut and telesoped newspaper layers – not so elegant : )
I had done that as a kid too, so one year I had my Sunday School class of 13 make trees. It was crazy when I had to spray paint all of them, because the kids were only six.
Again that trip down memory lane. In the 4th grade a teacher did that with us for Christmas one year as a gift for our family. Was such a big deal at the time.
I loved making macaroni pictures with all that Elmer’s glue! Everyone of them included a generous helping of cat hair and dog fur and I still loved the finished project.
Crushed ice candles using paragon, broken crayons, was coated milk cartons, and scented for Christmas. Traditional teacher gift with rock candy in which my job was to create “roads” in the confectionery sugar. My Mom was the ringleader for me and my 2 sisters. Good memories!
I really liked plastic lacing. Remember that stuff? It had many applications but two I remember most clearly were a squared off braid keychain and a stitched together “situpon” that was a newspaper sandwiched between oilcloth.
My mom never met a craft that she was not willing to try, talent was optional so we tended to learn whatever she was learning. She taught me to knit and to crochet before i was 10 (although my personal addiction did not begin until I was 13), learning to sew my own clothes was mandatory. But the most fun was quite different: the grandfather of my best friend, Jimmy, was a carpenter, and his grandfather fikked their back shed with scraps of wood. There were hammers, nails, screws, saws when we got older, and we could build whatever we wanted to with whatever was in the shed. So my favorite “craft” was building forts on the vacant lot between his home and mine. None of these creations would have passed a building code of any sort, but it kept us busy for hours and hours.
I feel compelled to add: the gum wrapper chains had to use Beechnut Spearmint gum wrappers: they sponsored the early, original American Bandstand which was on in the afternoon after school. The sponosr was Beechnut Spearmint gum, and fans of the show were encouraged to make not just chains, but actual little structures of of the gum wrappers with the hope that Dick would feature them on the show. I believe that how the whold gum wrapper art began
I immediately became 7 yeas old again and remembered making dolls from hollyhocks – so fun…
Sewing, mostly Barbie doll clothes
I made a doll house for yarn dolls out of Kleenex boxes. I made them to be hung on my wall with each room a new box.
Cutting out the models from my moms pattern magazines and making paper dolls.
My favorite craft project was and still is potholder looming.
Making paper chains (not just at Christmas). Using paper they were going to throw away at my dads paper company. We used to dig in the bins before they were emptied and find all sorts of wonderful papers for our “projects”
IBM punch card wreaths. And my Girl Scout troop spent weeks painting plaster plaques and then cutting out Holly Hobby pictures from wrapping paper and gluing them on the plaques in layers, separating the layers with dots of glue so you got a 3D effect. I quit soon after, when it became apparent that this troop was never going to go for any badge that meant being outdoors.
One Christmas we made trees out of magazines, you folded each page a certain way and they fanned out to make a tree. Then they got spray painted gold and silver, loved the smell!
My grandmother and mother were just as much into making things with thread, yarn, string, fabric, paint and paper. Always braiding, stitching or painting a scrap of wood. From Girl Scouts to macramé and spool necklaces my sister and I then majored in science but ended up art teachers and knitters. Love MDK stories.
I to do crafts with granddaughters. For years I arrived on visits to them with a suitcase of yarn, paper, glue, popsicle sticks etc. I want them to think creative too.
My neighbor and I would make tray favors for the local hospital. We used paper cups and attached whatever we drew or cut out of a magazine to the outside. How they got to the hospital I don’t recall – too many years ago.
And macrame, so many bracelets!
Macrame, gum wrapper chains, lanyards, plaster of Paris, potholders, paint by number… did them all. At Girl Scout camp we made macrame bracelets with old colored telephone wire.
Maybe not weird, but my favorite childhood craft memory is working alongside Captain Kangaroo on TV. It didn’t matter to me what he was making, the sound of his scissors crunching as he cut construction paper or cardboard mesmerized me. I can still hear that sound to this day. OK maybe this is weird! Before the commercial break he would announce the supplies that would be needed and I would rush to my bedroom to gather items from my considerable stash (yes, I had an impressive one even at the age of 5 ☺️) Childhood joy!
I remember the sound of Captain Kangaroo ‘s scissors too! I can still hear it!
We made metal chains out of the little tabs that popped off of aluminum drink cans. You wrapped the tab through the open end of the next one and you were off! I still have my metal chain and a gum wrapper chain too.
We also made furniture for tent caterpillars out ot tiny pieces of scrap wood.
My uncle worked for the station that had Captain Kangaroo on it in Los Angeles. I got to be on the show when I was around 7. It was a hoot!
Well, how cool is that??! I loved Capn Kangaroo! And Mr Rogers, of course. And Zoom, and something-Playroom. Too far back in my memory bank! But this question is fun!!!
Dabbled in many, not good at most. Tried paint by numbers, making potholders, knitting. I was good at following directions. My teenage neighbor, though, would make faces in leaves by poking her fingernail through them on her way home from school, and we’d discover them in our front yard. It was a fun mystery to search the yard for them, and discover how they got there!
Making clothes for my troll dolls. (Not with a sewing machine)
Omg, thought I was the only one. Still have the troll dolls and their handmade outfits, some with hand applied sequins and glass beads, also knitted pillows and blankets for them. Growing up in Arizona with no swimming pool and a mom who didn’t drive, I was stuck in the house a lot during the hot summers so I learned to be creative!
When I was a kid my mom was a Cub Scout den leader. As a girl, I got to hang around during meetings. I so clearly remember making stars from red striped plastic drinking straws; you gathered a bundle, tied a string around the middle, pulled tight and the star would form. To me it was a magical transformation!
Well. My mom and I would wrap a bar of soap in tule, tie it at one end for a “tail”, add sequins and, voila, a nice smelling “fish”! Well you said weird right??
For years I made Christmas ornaments from a kit that involved covering a styrofoam bell with sequins and plastic “pearls”. I’d get calluses on my fingers from pushing in all the pins.
I made those too. Oh my word, hadn’t thought of those in years. I can still remember how it felt to push those tiny pins into the beads & sequins and come up with a sparkly ball to hang on our tree. Think I’ll show my g-grands how to make those too.
I used to make doll house furniture out of scraps of wood, fabric and found objects ( aka trash)
We used to save , and find used, popsicle sticks and make boxes and bowls. I also loved doing mosaic ashtrays for my dad!
I used to take pots and pans from my grandmother’s kitchen outside and create all sorts of dishes and molded shapes by turning dirt and water into mud creations. It was not well received
I loved making baskets out of popsicle sticks.
I used to weave ribbon into ti y fish in different sizes! Adding magnets would makes them excellent fridge adornments!
When I was 10, my grandmother-who lived with us – quit smoking. And substituted sugarless gum for cigarettes. She had been a verrrry heavy smoker, and she was a wonderful grandmother, so you can imagine how many wrappers a day she saved for me! Downside they were all the same, upside nobody else had them so they would trade with me. Wonder if I would remember how to fold the wrappers. Is making a gum wrapper chain like riding a bike?
Thank you for giving me this memory!
Mod Podge!!! I had this hideous wine jug that I covered with all the different blues of tissue paper, I was sure it looked like stained glass. 😉
When I was in 2nd or 3rd grade I got a gum wrapper chain passed down to me. I was over 10 feet long when I got it. I think I managed to get it over 20 feet. So fun!
I loved my pot holder loom
I have always made my own greeting cards using random stuff from around our house. One time I cut some buttons off of my fathers shirts to use for flowers. I got in alot of trouble over that,
Making clothing for my troll dolls.
Not weird, but a really sweet memory. My dad (a big, burly NYC transit guy) helped me make candles that we then sold in order to fund my Girl Scout trip to Washington DC. I still remember the smell of melting wax in our apartment.
I loved making potholders on a loom. I also have mixed emotions about crochet. At least 5 family members tried to teach left-handed me to crochet. Many many times. My chains evolved into perfect spirals. If only Etsy had been around then, I could have created spirals as Christmas tree ornaments!
Remember when Puffs tissues smelled like like a soft summer breeze before they figured out if you have allergies you probably shouldn’t be blowing your nose with A scented tissue? Those puffs made beautiful wedding gowns and party dresses for my Barbie’s.. not only were all of dressed so beautiful but they smelled good too! Box of tissues and some scotch tape, that was my hobby!
I think my favorite was to make collages out of absolutely anything–big, 3D ones that were impossible to store and had stuff sloughing off constantly.
My mom used to take her old wooden thread spools .. put some of Papa’s in them and showed us how to “knit “ when we were very little.. the spools were not colorful at all.. but what came out were masterpieces which Mama helped us sew together for potholders
I enjoyed learning to crochet with my Grandma. I love maps and could easily dive into a school project like drawing or coloring world maps, adding products made in a state or country, or, my favorite, adding cotton balls to a map of NY State to represent battles of the Revolutionary War.
Spool knitting and gimp bracelets…..I loved doing both! One for the winter and one for the summer. My kids got the gimp bug, but never liked spool knitting. I guess it is a generational thing. And now, I want to get my hands on some gimp! Thanks for the memories!
I think my favorite as a kid was latch hook rugs. I guess like knitting, I just found the repetitive motion soothing and loves the bright colors of the yarn.
Woven potholders! Everyone had a drawer full!
The craft I did most often was cross-stitch. I was obsessed, as I am now with knitting. I made so many projects that I ran out of wall space for hanging them. I gave plenty away too, and also did many pieces on clothing as well. I still have several hundred patterns, a bookcase full, for which I paid full price. I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with them for years. There’s just not enough lifetime for all my hobby wishes. So on the off chance you pull my name, please pass on the felting kit to the next person.
I’m embarrassed to say, making Christmas trees out of old issues of Readers Digest.
Painting wooden Christmas ornaments from a kit!
I would cover Pringles cans with fabric from my moms stash and glue fabric faces on them. They oddly looked like Mr Potato Heads.
I had a whole slew of them.
String art!
So many. Hard to choose. I did love tatting with my grandmother (I need to re learn that) and tie dye.
Anything on You Tube that uses dollar store socks. The list includes Christmas gnomes, Easter gnomes, autumn gnomes—endless possibilities for a couple of hours of fun.
So fun to read these comments! They brought back loads of craft memories like the Christmas wreath we made in Girl Scouts from a wire coat hanger and hundreds of strips of green garbage bags cut with pinking shears.
And a trivet of popsicle sticks and wooden beads we made in kindergarten. Someone–no idea who–drilled two tiny holes in the tops and bottoms of the sticks. We kids strung the tops together with string and spaced out the bottom with beads between the sticks to make a circle. It’s got a Danish modern vibe, and it’s still in use at my mother’s.
We made poodles with wire coat hangers and dry cleaning bags. They were pink and blue.
I loved using gimp to make bracelets, making candles, and then as a preteen and into high school I went to a 4H group dedicated to sewing. I loved that group and learned so much!
Book binding to make your own journal using this cardboard and wallpaper sample books.
My grandmother would gather us girls for Cousin Club and what fun we had!! Lots of fun crafts – embroidery (I still have my “First Work”) and at Christmas making things like oranges with cloves stuck in them to hang in the closet. I recently found a picture of us with our “smocks” admiring our spray painted styrofoam candles. Thank you for the great memories.
We used to take the scrap telephone wire (for those of you very young telephone wire came on huge wooden spools like thread but table sized) and we would make rings, bracelets etc. If you were very talented you could make flowers and crosses (I was very talented)
I still remember the year I got shrinky dinks. You painted regular size plastic shapes and then baked them and they shrunk. The whole apartment smelled extremely toxic by the end of the process and you had a tiny version of what you had painted. It sounds less magical when I type it out but it was the best. The kit was expensive by my family’s standards so getting it was a pretty big deal.
I also loved coloring a sheet of paper with tons of crayon colors, covering it with black paint, and then using a toothpick to make a picture. The colors underneath made the lines of your pictures. Not high tech like the shrinky dinks but fascinating, nonethless.
What in the world was I thinking. I never taught my son the art of coloring a sheet of paper and then covering in black and then using the toothpick. I loved that. I may have to teach to the grands. It was fun and I am sure kept us busy for awhile
My brothers and I used to make christmas tree garland out of gum wrappers!
I did lots of ad hoc crafting as child. One of my favorite projects was the Christmas ornaments I made from milkweed pods gathered from a nearby field. I covered the inside in glitter, added some polyfill to the bottom on top of which I perched a little plastic elf or other figurine, glued gold braid around the outside edges, and then added a gold thread hanger. I gave several of these to my parents as a Christmas gift when I was 9 or 10. My parents are gone now, but these ornaments still hang on my tree each year as a sweet reminder of the many wonderful holidays I shared with them.
70s groovy macrame
Omigosh! I just realized I didn’t have a crafty childhood. I was too busy riding my bike all over town, wading in creeks trying to catch tadpoles, and hanging upside down from the monkey bars on the playground, I guess. Oh, and reading, of course. It was a fun childhood. Just not very crafty. Many years later I learned embroidery and knitting. I’m still working on the knitting!
Wow I got a lot done as a child. I biked, climbed trees, read, hung out with friends and baked for all our families on Saturday, did shrinky dinks, sewed cloths for my dolls, colored, painted, did ceramics and so much more. We went and picked wild black berries and used pine cones for so many things and leaves too. I loved this thread
Cutting out paper dolls from McCall’s magazine, making candles with wax and crushed ice.
Oh, we did the candles with ice, too! You filled a waxed milk carton with ice, hung a wick inside, and then poured in the hot wax, which partly melted the wax. When it hardened, you tore off the milk carton and voila, a candle with interesting random holes!
My older sister put 4 nails on the end of a large empty spool and we made cords, essentially I-cords. She would sew hers into a large round, like a trivet.
My favorite craft was making potholders. I do remember chewing gum wrapper chains!
I loved making the potholders & still do! I’m on my umteenth bag of loom refills I’m running out of relatives to foist my potholders on.
My mom and my aunts constantly used to get me new craft kits to get into but some of my favorites included the soap making one and the bead weaving loom. My mom always had the time to partake in a new endeavor with me.
I remember braiding gymp to make lanyards, bracelettes, and key chains. It was plastic, flat and difficult to end a project neatly. The more complicated the patterns used 6 or more strands and the pattern woud spiral around the cord.
We used to melt crayons on a candle stuck in a bottle- so much fun! It was an OUTDOOR craft only, so we wouldn’t burn the house down! The colors would run together and make patterns- hey! Maybe that’s where the knitting comes in! Hmmmm.
My first foray into crafts was probably threading my grandmother’s embroidery needles. She made the stamped cross stitch quilt tops. After a stroke left her left side paralyzed, someone had to help her split and thread her needles. I didn’t think it was a big deal but it meant a lot to my grandmother. I think that is what started me in crafts. Stamped cross stitch to embroidery, an aunt that crocheted, a few more that knit. If it has a string of any type I’m there – except macrame – something about the knots.
My dad would collect the marbles that were “not to be brought to school” (but were) and bring them home. We would boil them on them the stove in a pot of water and as they cooled and cracked discussed with great intent which walkway stone we would decorate next. That part involved concrete, popsicle sticks and noisy dogs/cats/poultry.
Im not sure my mother’s opinion of this continuing endeavor but I suspected she wondered about having married an art teacher.
I had this kit called “Pom pon maker” that had a little caterpillar shaped plastic maker, tons of cool bulky yarn, and felt printed with eyes, breaks, ears, wings etc that you attached to your little pompoms to make all kinds of critters.
Oh, Kay, you make me giggle. (So do you, DJ — don’t get in a twist, there! ❤️)
I remember lots of unfinished crafting projects — from potholders to lanyard kits to a yarn octopus with a styrofoam head wrapped in yarn that then you braided into 8 arms. Unfinished because I either didn’t get the directions or I lost interest.
macrame and shoebox dioramas
My mother was my Girl Scout troop leader. We made so many crafts to earn badges. My favorite craft was when we took long skinny triangles of Contact paper and rolled them into beads to string into necklaces. My favorite badge was a camping badge where we took a large tuna can, a strip of card board the same width as the depth of the tuna can, paraffin wax and and empty institutional size can (#10). The card board was wrapped into a spiral in the tuna can and filled with the melted paraffin. We took a can opener to make holes around the base of the #10 can. We lit the cardboard in the tuna can and put the #10 can over it. Once it was hot, we cooked pancakes on the top of the #10 can. So much fun and creativity!
I had long strings of gum wrapper chains in my bedroom. Double mint, though, not Juicy Fruit. I loved to make bead and wire rings that looked like a circle of daisies. I taught myself to crochet in my teens and I put tons of beads on that stuff, too.
I did hand embroidery. My biggest project was a full-length Holly Hobbie (remember her?) on the back of a denim shirt, for my sister.
Gum wrapper chains were fun but I loved painting rocks the best!
My favorite was sitting with Grandma at her card table making Christmas ornaments with foam balls, sequins and pins. We had the best time and I still have the ornaments from 50+ years ago.
Latch hook kits. I loved them. So, so tacky. But super relaxing and in that repetitive kind of way.
I don’t even know what this was called, but my older sister had a set of molds that you poured some sort of rubbery plastic into and baked, and it made small monster creatures. She very occasionally let me use it (while she supervised). I thought it was the coolest thing ever!
I saved apple seeds and strung them together for a hippie look necklace. My poor little fingers got stuck so many times forcing that sharp needle through apple seeds.
Thanks for sending me down the you-tube black hole to remember how to make gum wrapper chains. What I love best is to think of all of us all around the country (world?) loving the same crafts when we were children. Soooo many ideas to pass on to my grandchildren. Salt dough ornaments, digging clay from the creek bank to make clay dishes, spool knitting, woven pot holders, making Barbie clothes. Weren’t we blessed.
Potholders and spool knitting
Thinking of favorite Christmas crafts— filling a milk carton with ice cubes and a string, pouring melted paraffin wax over the ice to create a lacy candle. Decorate with holly leaves.
And remember computer punch cards? Fold corners and staple for a wreath to spray gold or silver and cover with glitter. Oh, and folding in edges of a readers digest, fanning into a circle, top with styrofoam ball. Add some cardboard cutout wings. Spray paint gold or silver, more glitter, and voilà, an Angel!
Macrame–I remember making an owl necklace on a Girl Scout camping trip. The owl perched on a found stick, so it was also a memento! I did macrame at home, too–hanging plant holders, wall hangings, bracelets, oh my! Enjoying reading here: so many reminders of fun projects–and some that were fun at least halfway through & then abandoned. 😉 I think perhaps our children now are missing out…
Papier-mâché made with the goo from cooked oatmeal. Non-toxic, inexpensive, and delicious-smelling!
Friendship bracelets out of embroidery thread! So many bracelets
I remember making a potholder in school, I didn’t like it. However, because of your amazing skills of description, I bought the potholder loom, and now I have to fight my 22 year old to make yet another potholder. Can’t explain the satisfaction! But please please do not tell me about any bridges that might be for sale in that amazing persuasive way you have!!!! 😉
I liked making models out of toothpicks and popsicles. My magnum opus was the golden gate bridge.
I remember weaving together folded gum wrappers to make bracelets when I was a little kid. I completely forget how to do it!
Loved craft kits as a child. My most favourite was a sewing/embroidery kit. I still can’t embroider but I can sew so I guess something stuck!
Before my grandmother taught me to knit, she purchased a knitting nobby( I think that’s what it was called).. She lived upstairs from my dad and I and I could only go up if I asked first. I must have made miles of I cord! I would make rugs for my dolls, or blankets! It did keep me busy!
We used to make tiny cradles out of half of a walnut shell. A tiny wooden bead for the head, and a tiny scrap of fabric for the blanket. It would be nestled inside walnut shell, and we would attach thread to hang it. I still have one hanging on my Christmas tree from oh so long ago!
Sewing, my aunt was a professional seamstress & she taught me. I also liked embroidery.
I loved making paper snowflakes and chain paper garlands.
We made angels and other decorations out of magazines by folding each page a certain way, affixing extras like styrofoam balls, etc. and spray painting. We also made a lot of candles out of beeswax sheets and scent drops. Was big fun back in the 60s. Just dated myself! haha!!
My favourite childhood craft was bobbin lace, specifically torchon. I always assumed it was weird because the kids my age had never heard of making lace with a pillow and bobbins, lace was something that just came attached to clothes…
Punch needle 🙂
My mother and I used to make Angels from cardboard paper towel holders, styrofoam (for heads), cheesecloth (dipped in glue and water), and pipe cleaners. They were amazing! Each one with its own personality and all of our friends had some! I had actually forgotten about how wonderful those angels were until reading todays snippet!! Love those memories.
My mother was very artistic serial hobbyist. Painting, sewing, quilting, beading, macrame, anything you can think of! There was always something to learn. Her house is filled with her wonderful creations.
I remember making collages with colored popcorn glued onto cardboard. I don’t think much of that colored popcorn was ever popped – I think everyone used it for crafts!
Under the category “How did we survive childhood unscathed”:
One year we made ornaments in school by gluing cut up Christmas cards onto can lids. All those sharp edges, but I don’t remember anyone getting cut! My mom still has the one I made from a canned ham lid with a picture of Santa Claus on it. Usually hangs down low and towards the back…
I did almost everything mentioned in this set of comments but my most favorite craft was to take an empty metal soup can, wrap it in construction paper and glue popsicle sticks vertically onto the paper and then paint it with colors.
Shaving Crayola crayons onto wax paper and melting them with an iron is the one I remember best. The 64 crayon size box was the bomb.
Then cutting them into shapes, punching a hole to put a string through and hanging them in the window like stained glass.
My recycle fun workshop teacher let us use soldering irons and lead based solder (it was 1971, safety was not invented yet). However, I loved my sewing plush animals and doll clothes from velvet and satin scraps my grandfather brought me home from his job as a casket liner.
scraping peanut butter on pinecones and then sprinkling birdseed to make a “bird feeder”
As a kid, I started a cooking club.It was my favorite thing to do. Gues what I ended up doing as an adult? Despite my nursing degree? Mary in Cincinnati
I love to craft Barbie furniture from bottle caps. Popsicle sticks, empty boxes and other assorted’junque’ the beginnings of my mad recycling
Oh man, there were so many. The ones I spent the most time on were probably Sculpey/Fimo clay and plastic canvas. I still have a box of little figurines and things I made out of clay. I made all kinds of plastic canvas things – stuff for Barbies and trolls, but my biggest was probably a chess set.
My mom did every craft imaginable & this thread of comments brought back so many memories of home made projects. The weirdest might have been saving the plastic L’eggs pantyhose eggs & glueing seasonal colors of rick rack, ribbons & beads on them for Easter & Christmas decorations.
I just received the potholder loom from MDK to replace some ancient, faded potholders with colorful squares for my daughter & me. My granddaughter will learn the potholder trade when she’s a little older.
Making pompoms
In Girl Scouts, we made a copier or “ mimeograph” out of gelatin! We poured some gelatin concoction into a cookie sheet. It got very firm. We pressed a handwritten page onto it leaving an imprint, pressed a blank page onto that: instant (!) copy!! Wipe it off and do it again!
Besides the usual spool knitting pot holders gum wrapper chains, my best friend and I would make clothes for our troll dolls from tissues. Looking back, the hours we spent doing this taught us patience, dexterity and the art of conversation with very little words.
At Christmas time my sister and I would make garland for our tree out of green and red construction paper cut into strips and glued together into rings.
Shrinks Dinks at the neighbors house!
I loved making the little tooled leather kits when I was a kid. I still have a little change purse. Tussie mussies and glamour balls – my mom always had a new craft to explore.
I made hundreds of yarn dolls for my other dolls. They got them for Christmas.
I loved whittling. My Grandpa taught me how to make a GeeHawWhimmididdle!
As kids my sisters and I were obsessed with clay for a few springs and summers. We jumped and wobbled on big natural plates of clay on the the empty land outside our schoolyard, too new to be fenced. The clay layer massed up and lifted, tight as a drum, and we could do a sort of mini trampoline thing on top. We went down to the small creek we passed on our way to school, found clay deposits left by the water, scooped it up and.made tiny pinch and coil pots. When we deemed them good enough, we used our cheap watercolour sets, to give them, a set now, deep pink interiors and cobalt outsides. I found them in my mother’s jewellery box more than fifty years later, still unbroken. Then I began taking classes in throwing clay on a wheel, and just before I sat down to breakfast, I took a load of Christmas ornaments and bowls from the cooled kiln.
My most memorable crafting is when my mother taught me and my sister embroidery, and my sister embroidered her sampler in the hoop to her dress. Also, I will never forget my grandmother buying bolts of cloth and sewing dresses for all five of her grandkids, often including matching petticoats. I was the best dressed then!
At 9, my aunt taught me to knit. Knitting got me through summers of being cooped up inside due to allergies. Weaving was fun, too.
Making loopy potholders
We would remove the insides of the bread and just leave the crusty bun shell. Instead of eating the bun insides, we would ball it up in our hands and make a dough. We would use red food coloring and pinch off little pieces of the dough. Then we would flatten pieces between our fore fingers and thumbs that we would roll up into the beginnings of a rose (bud). Once the bud was created, we would then flatten more pieces and add the “petals” around the bud to create a rose flower. Once dried, we would use a glue mixture to set the flowers. We would use the little roses to adorn all sorts of items.
My fun memory of crafting, with my mom and family in Denmark, are making little spring cut out of tissue paper. They looked like giant snowflakes. And sending them to friends. You would fold up a tissue paper. Fold in half, and in half again and again. Cut off edge, so it would be a round piece. Cut lots of funny holes, so it looked like a snowflake. Then you would write a little poem and put your name with dots. So the receiver had to guess, who it was from. You also often included a real dried spring flower, often the little white snowdrops, I think , they are called.
After sending the letters, you made more for your own house and put them up on windows. This was a spring event and done around Easter .
Paint by numbers.
Sewing. I would always be allowed to root through my grandmother’s boxes of fabric and occasionally talk her into buying new fabric for me. I used to sew all my own clothes. I remember those times fondly.
Oh my God, I’ve had a crafting table since I was a child. It was down in the basement of our Washington DC house. There you could make a mess & leave it, Paint by number , oil pastels, weaving pot holders, and making gummy creatures (not edible) or plastic shapes with a electric heater and braiding or macrame. If you can think it we made it, but I never could learn to knit until now. I now have a craft room, what a gift my mom gave us. I hope you all are well and the tornados missed you. Prayers for all. Merry Christmas or Happy Hanukkah.
If you are talking folded gum wrapper chains then I am in. Xox
I’m not sure what it’s called, but we would take two sticks and cross them, then wrap yarn around and around, with the potential of making a pretty, stripey design along the way. You could make them with random forest sticks or with popsicle sticks for a more uniform look.
Also, after my grandmother (not grandma, she hated being called that) taught me to finger crochet chains, I had them hanging all over my bedroom. My love of yarn started early.
They were called God’s Eyes. There’s one my brother made 57 yrs ago that still hangs on mom’s tree – beautiful in mohair yarns.
We called what you’re describing with the sticks and yarn “God’s Eyes.” Loved those!
We made animals with clay. My best friend Noel and I made dinosaurs wearing backpacks and hats with propellers, so they could fly.
My favorite childhood craft was making paper mache out of old newspapers.
I learned to knit at 10, so there was that . . . and I spent hours drawing my own paper dolls. I also had a kit once to make flowers by making outlines of leaves with wire and dipping them in some kind of noxious plastic liquid film. They were kind of pretty in a 70’s kind of way, and it was fun. Hadn’t thought of that smell in years – thanks for cueing up that lost memory.
I had that kit too! It reeked, & was likely a health hazard
I made yards of gum wrapper chains, with my dad saving all the gum wrappers for me that he could. The other fun craft done by family members was making the folded paper German stars at Christmas, then dipping the stars into melted wax and sprinkling them with glitter. Best use of glitter ever. Sad to admit that I do not know what happened to all those creations.
Ooh, making goblets out of gum wrappers was a favorite.
Pot holders!! The more garish the colors, the better!! And then peddling them door to door in our neighborhood.
Since it’s Christmas, I’ll share my weird holiday craft. Using the metal ends from frozen juice cans, we would cut circular images from last years’s Christmas cards and glue them to the circles. A loop of silver cord was attached to the back and covered with construction paper. A liberal coating of glitter was applied over all (is it a wonder we didn’t all have pulmonary issues from the glitter in the 60’s?). Putting up my tree yesterday, I realized that the one I have kept through the years just turned 50.
Making string lanterns by soaking bakers twine in laundry starch, wrapping it around balloons, sprinkling with glitter, and letting it dry. I’d hang them up in my room until my mom got tired of vacuuming up the glitter!
making friendship bracelets!
I was big into the potholders. Our 6th grade class made them as part of a unit on cottage industry vs. the industrial revolution. I was the kid who taught everyone else how to finish th ett m by pulling the loops through one another. I also loved the plastic lace lanyards at camp. So portable, for crafting wherever you want!
Whatever craft kit they carried at the local 5 and 10 cent store, I did many times over. Pot holders, pretend stained glass, paint by numbers. Embroidery, daisy chains, gum wrapper chains. Crochet, knitting, sewing doll clothes wardrobes and an “I Dream of Jeanie” bottle dollhouse and costume for a troll doll…
My Grandma teaching me to crochet is the first memory of crafting I have.
Oh my goodness! What a walk down memory lane, reading all the comments! I had forgotten about the macaroni glued to a can and spray painted. And the Thingmaker! But the weirdest one I remember involved folding the pages of a Reader’s Digest into a pattern (the magazines had way more pages then) and gluing the front and back pages together so all the pages fanned out into a shape, got spray painted and became a.. I have no idea. I don’t remember what it was. Maybe a tree that we then decorated?
In any case, thank you for the memories you brought back with this question and all the responses.
As a kid it was the thing with the spool and nails or the potholder loom. As an adult I’m all about tie dye – or knitting? I guess it’s knitting.
Potholder loop slingshots, popsicle stick jewelry boxes and gimp anything
Well, I was a knitter and dabbled in sewing. But I also enjoyed macramé and making gum wrapper chains.
Of course having Gramma teach me to knit during summers at her house was the best. At actual ‘camp’ (ie Mom dispatching us to the local pool to get out of her hair and someone else bringing crafting supplies), lanyards were big. I didn’t excel at them but I enjoyed making clothes pin dolls.
My childhood craft memory is one of defense-by-logic. It may have been considered fun, beautiful or fascinating but, to me, even crafts had to be LOGICAL. In Brownies we were given the project of decorating a flyswatter with glitter and rickrack and stuff. I was very stingy with my decoration. The den mother was encouraging me to be lavish with the glitter. I asked, Why? It’s just going to get knocked off as soon as my mother swats a fly!.
I loved making a tree decoration each year with my Mom. They were all different — some years we made tiny birds nests, another year elves using old wooden sewing thread spools — I think she got the supplies and ideas from an elder — Liz—who live across the street from us. Liz’s house was a wonder of craft supplies ( to my child’s eye) and my Mom would send me over there to “barrow” ribbon or some other craft item. I was so blessed to have two crafty creative women in my life ! My Mom also encouraged my drawing and painting ( which I did all the time) all through my child & teenhood— so early on I identified as an artist…
Speaking of juicy fruit, we made a contest of making gum wrapper chains, 10 feet would not even be a contender.
One year (at perhaps age 10) I painted chopsticks with abstract designs, and my brother and I took our pairs with us to a Chinese restaurant. The other diners were envious.
Doll house furniture.often made of tissue paper and scotch tape. Paper dolls. We moved a lot and often had empty shelves to fill with our creations while waiting to leave or unpack. Very fun memories.
It’s not really weird but I used to make woven potholders on a loom. My sister and I used to knit and rip out the same balls of yarn over and over. Many years later my mother made me a scrappy crocheted blanket and incorporated all that yarn. It a treasure that makes me happy every time I look at it!
That blanket sounds like a treasure! What a wonderful mom to think of that!
Omigosh, what fun to remember! I did every craft mentioned here–I was a very crafty kid and always had a new interest. Haven’t thought about some of them for years, like the soap and tulle craft. No surprise when you are polling rabid knitters!
My girlfriends and I would make ropes out of Juicy Fruit wrappers! You fold them and fit them together. The story was that your husband/boyfriend would be the same size as your rope when you were finished. Lots of Juicy Fruit was consumed for those projects!
Too funny Kay!! I ran a law office and many there knitted at lunch time in a conference room!!! Yes, helps with anxiety…and bonding too!
the “craft” I remember from childhood was making mudpies filled with flowers, leaves, weeds, all wonderful growing things! And we would sit in the shade under the steps and eat small bites of the finished pies – ewwww!
Paper chains and threading popcorn onto long threads for the Christmas tree. I think we even made chains out of fresh cranberries—how we did that without making a huge mess I don’t know!
I loved papermache using balloons to make animals 🙂
Woven potholders and lanyards made from long, thin, colorful plastic strips.
Creating with beads. There was an older woman in my apartment building who had been a seamstress and she gave me a box full of beautiful beads. I just loved them.
The city we lived in had a Arts & Crafts program where we painted figurines and made key chains & lanyards out of vinyl cording. We had very little money, but a quarter here and there bought us hours of crafting fun! We built structures out of popcicle sticks. I also remember making tissue paper flowers at a local store. As I got older, I learned to save my allowance for bigger & better crafts!
Construction paper mosaics and collages. And the paper had to be ripped into pieces, not cut. All the soft, rugged edges.
Making potholders with those loops and metal contraption.
My fav childhood craft was making lanyards out of plastic ??? I’m not even sure what to call them. Also friendship bracelets, lots of friendship bracelets. I also knitted as a child and entered my 1st sweater in the county fair at age 9. It was a cardigan out of yellow Red Heart. It was through 4H and I remember also knitting bedroom slippers.
Yes lanyards! The only word I could remember for them is gimp… did you call them gimp where you grew up?
It was the one where you dip strips of newspaper into flour and water and then lay them around a blown up balloon until they dry. When you pop the balloon, you have a mask or a bowl or something else solid. I loved that.
I was a drawing fool! But any craft would keep me happy. I’d make miles of single crochet chains, & was shown how to knit Portuguese style before I was ten. & Mom had a little ceramic studio, so painting was always a thing, too
A weird craft we did in school was to dye eggshells, smash them, and make mosaic pictures of them. I was more into embroidery and loom potholders at home.
Thanks for the momories and the give-away!
Potholder loom
Gimp. Those little flat plastic strands that I wove int endless keychains for people who had keys
I learned to knit in elementary school in Germany at age 10 in handarbeit class, we made a doll of garter stitch rectangles stitched and stuffed and still knit continental. But I remember playing cats cradle, and what a wonderful toy made with only a piece of yarn!
This is so funny – I was just explaining to my husband last night about spool knitting! I just kept going I had a grocery sized bag of it … never figured out what to do with that long skinny tube – I wonder what ever happened to it? I also loved making paper dolls and clothes for them – I’m not that old anyone else make their own paper dolls?
My favorite craft was painting ceramics in my aunt’s basement because she had a kiln. So many ash trays!!
I loved latch hooking – especially 70’s style designs.
Hands down the pomanders made of Dove soap bars covered in beads, sequins and fancy ribbon! Everything attached with the teensy tiny sequin pins.
My favorite childhood craft was hook rugs and anything made at summer camp! I especially loved the lanyards and macrame.
These comments are reminding me of so many crafts I did too. I recall making tons of paper snowflakes. I wanted each design to be different. For some reason I stored them in an old Quaker oats cylinder box.
My mom wasn’t crafty. Wasn’t a baker either. All my crafting was thru campfire girls or taught by our Mama- a dirty if grandma who baby sat us. Did a lot of sewing. Taught myself to Tat. Loved making doillies.
Gum wrapper chains, definitely! Had them hanging from a bulletin board hanging above my bed. Also spool knitting and embroidered dish towels and, of course, knitting!
Another wonderful thread! With a wonderful, very crafty mom who was also our Camp Fire Girl leader, we tried just about every craft that’s been mentioned, except gum wrapper chains. Not sure how we missed those. Both grandmas joined in when they visited, sometimes bringing new projects their friends were making (hello salt dough baskets…). I still have an example of most of our creations (and the instructions/equipment/supplies!). The wierdest craft was probably the telephone wire jewelry. In addition to my regular fiber crafts, I’m also revisiting many of my old favorites and they’re even more fun now…love my new batch of potholders!
Reading everyone’s comments have brought back a flood of wonderful memories. I don’t think it was a craft, but the earliest “maker” activity I can remember is mud pies. Later, moving on to clove fruit pomanders (oranges were the best) wrapped in black mesh were so much fun. My mother still has one that I made around 1960.
All these comments bring back so many memories. Yes to “corking” and juicy fruit wrapper chains. Yes to lanyards and friendship bracelets made with that thin flat lacing material and so many macrame plant hangers! Waiting for my Mom’s McCalls magazine to come so I could cut out the “Betsy McCall” paper doll and make more clothes for her.
Wow! So many wonderful crafts mentioned today. I was a Camp Fire Girl too and remember many afternoons working with different media. I remember making a mosaic ash tray for my dad. My mom and I tried all kinds of crafts including hooking rugs, needlepoint, crochet. I especially loved making the vests that were all the rage, large colorful granny squares on front and back with a gusset. Great fun! I miss my mom.
I’ve done about every craft on this list. One oddball craft we did in 1968 or so was decoupage lunchbox purses. This was all the rage in Flushing, anyway. You had to acquire one of those large black men’s lunchboxes with the curved top. We cut out magazine pictures and glued them on the outside and then shellacked the surface. Then we had to line the inside of the lunch box with felt squares in a checkerboard designed glued on with Elmer’s glue. We actually used these as purses in seventh grade.
This has been such a fun trip down memory lane. We were always crafting as kids and loved getting craft kits every year at Christmas. Maybe that’s why I keep adding to my list of “want to try” crafts. Needle felting is definitely on that list. I’m not sure if any of the crafts from my childhood qualify as weird. Two of the more fascinating ones for me were making candles using crayon nubbins and glass jars and making Ukranian Easter eggs. Maybe it was a fascination with melted wax!
A Christmas Time craft involved melting wax in an aluminum pan — the kind that is left after you eat all the Sara Lee Cinnamon Swirl Coffeecake — and adding bits of crayon if there wasn’t already enough color from melted leftover candles. Fill the sink with icy cold water and VERY QUICKLY push the pan of melted wax down into the water. The wax would be forced up into swirly towers, very fantastical and beautiful. Of course, you got wax stuck to your arms, too, but it didn’t burn since it cooled so quickly in the cold water. Decorate the resulting sculpture with small ornaments or greenery. That was probably one of the weirdest …
… but there was always a craft table at our house and it was always covered with scrappy stuff that turned into the most amazing things. I do remember eating a lot of popsicles in order to have the sticks for crafts. I didn’t ever think that I might be able to buy just the sticks … maybe they weren’t available to purchase without the rest of the popsicle back then. Anyway. The babysitting money went to buy crafty stuff and that included popsicles (for the sticks) and yarn and thread and material and paper and crayons (the biggest box available). It was kind of an unspoken rule in our house that you didn’t BUY stuff for people. Gifts were always handmade. (Maybe we’d spent all our money on popsicles and Sara Lee coffeecake!)
Paint-by-numbers, lanyards, and my mom and I spray painted cattails gold for a super mod Xmas arrangement.
Do you still sell the cardboard bos that holds the field guides? My box is full and the field guides keep coming and I have no safe place for them.
I used to make furniture for my troll dolls out of those little individual serving cereal boxes. They looked like little armoires to me. If I was feeling fancy I would paint them!
Potholders and lanyards; before that, spool knitting with rainbow-colored Red Heart (when it was still wool). Brief dabbling with woodburning.
My brother and I used to make bows and arrows out of branches and string. Does that count?
Hah! Remember the first generation of toaster ovens? When they were just about toasting 4 slices of bread laid flat and you choice of toasting level was on or off? The top was just large enough to fit a letter-size paper. Under supervision, we used the top to melt our crayon pieces into the paper – so much that it became somewhat translucent – wonderful crazy abstract stained windows when hung on a a regular window for the light.
Sewing A-Line skirts in 7th grade home ec class, polishing a petosky stone picked up from the northern beach of Lake Michigan, building fairy houses out of sticks and leaves in the back yard….thanks for the opportunity to unearth these memories!
We also did the wooden empty spool with nails thing. I loved that. Mom called it “making mouse tails”. I still make a mouse tail when I need a long i-cord.
Favorite craft from when I was a kid would have to be macrame. I don’t remember what I did with all the macrame I made, but I made a lot!
We made doll cradles out of empty cardboard oatmeal boxes, jewelry boxes out of tuna cans with macaroni and gold spray paint and jointed 3d animals out of my dads wood scraps. My husband was very surprised to discover that I knew how to run a bandsaw, lathe, shaper and change all the blades and knives on them. My weirdest craft involved a box that he made that I glued egg shell pieces on in geometric designs on the outside. The inside of the lid contained the 3d design made of 5-6 copies of the same greeting card where you cut out the same parts of the picture and glued them one on top of the other using thick gobs of hot melt glue so they appeared to be 3d. It was a large box and my mother stored her patterns in it until the day she died at 96 last year.
I remember doing macrame as a kid, and amused that it’s back again big time. I also made hairpin lace (it was called U-pin back in India, because of the shape of the tool) and it was fun in a hippie-dippie kind of way. I wonder if it’ll become a fad again, you never know!
I had (have) a major crush on gimp lanyards and all the swanky playground leaders and lifeguards that wore them. Sadly, I never mastered that box stitch that allowed the lanyard to adjust. But happily I am a knitter!
A Wooly Creature kit! Oh, pick me, pick me! Daisy chains out of dandelions in the summer or paper hats made from the Sunday comics with Grandpa.
Definitely finger knitting. No weird smells but it certainly explains why I now do “real” knitting.
We loved making friendship bracelets! We constantly had dmc pinned to our jeans, and were creating all sorts of fun knots and color combinations to give to our friends.
I’m not sure this qualifies as a craft project, but I have very fond memories of making poppy bead bracelets. The best part was buying the ice cream from the street vendor to “obtain” the beads.
Embroidery- kick-started by a Christmas gift. Still have the original hoop and a couple of the projects. Paint by numbers. Decoupage using diluted white glue.
I got an Indian beadwork loom when I was twelve and made belts using seed beads which really took a long time to complete. Then there were the potholder looms and smaller looms that you used with yarn to make squares for doll blankets. I remember learning how to embroider making small linen wall hangings which had Bible verses or some insightful quote that took forever to finish.
Me, too! I had a beadwork loom, with tiny beads and a twisted wire needle. Hours of fun yielded me a little bracelet. My sister and I also made woven paper Danish hearts, but we made them on May 1 for May baskets.
We used to make paper snowflakes. They’re not weird but I liked trying to make them as intricate as possible.
I don’t know if anyone else remembers hair wraps? You’d take a tiny section of hair, braid it, then use different colors of embroidery floss to wrap it in intricate designs. It was a fad in my elementary school after a couple of the richer girls came back from Caribbean vacations with them. I was already into elaborate friendship bracelets so the hair wrapping wasn’t hard to do.
I still remember one of the rich girls being so MAD that her special hair wasn’t so special anymore. She pitched a tantrum and cut off her hair wrap with scissors, which left an extremely obvious little tuft of centimeter-long hair sticking up. Ha!
My favorite craft memory from childhood is being taught to knit at age 7 by my immigrant grandmother. Her patience in this as in everything was beyond belief. I would come to her 10 times an hour to ask which part of the stitch I was up to. Later, when I mastered the basics, she would finish abandoned projects for me, alternating those projects with ones of her own, mainly stockpiling baby sweaters and bonnets for future great grandchildren she knew she might not live to meet. I continue to miss her now as always as I teach my own granddaughter to knit and think of all I will not live to see.
I loved paint by numbers, especially horses, as a kid. Also did lots of bead work when I could afford beads (my parents bought me a small bead loom for Christmas one year that I still have). And I made all the tack and accessories for my small stable of beloved Breyer horses that I spent hours selecting and saving for. This involved sewing, embroidering, bits of leather work, etc. Our verandah was strung with bale twine for pastures for them during the summers, and my sister and the neighbour girl spent hours playing with them, when we weren’t busy with our real ponies.
Our Girl Scout Christmas craft would probably be banned today, or at least re-named. Our leader cut the mistletoe from her trees so we could attach pieces of it to styrofoam balls, then we tied a red ribbon on top. These creations were called “kissing balls,” believe it or not.
Well….this will definitely show how old I am. ha! I cut out people from an old Montgomery Ward’s catalog to use as “paper dolls.” Then would look thru the catalog for clothing that would fit over them. I had several families interacting with kitchen appliances, baby carriages, toys, etc., all cut from the catalog. Talk about cheap entertainment on a rainy day.
I loved making those weird gum wrapper chains! Also, collecting mallo-cup cards.
I had a huge gum wrapper chain! And was always on the lookout for pretty gum wrappers colors to add to it. My favorite craft, though, was making outfits out of scraps of fabric for a real fur toy mouse that was about 2 1/2 inches tall.
Spool knitting…yards and yards of it.
I have always been crafty especially during my Brownie days. But when my sister and I were sitting around trying not to get in trouble we would gather shells from our gravel drives and paint them and try to sell them. Mother would beg us to make the loop potholders which we did too. We did love our shells.
Making mud pies, sewing and crocheting doll clothes and using paint by number oils to give said dolls fashion makeovers.
I grew up pre-Barbie, when there were Ginny dolls shaped like actual girls. I made lots of clothes for them on my mother’s vintage Singer sewing machine, and fairly quickly graduated to making my own clothes with the help of Mom and Grandma. My first actual garment , made when I was about 9, was a fitted dress with a sailor collar, set-in sleeves, and a side zipper. After that I made pretty much all my clothes. Hated taking mandatory 8th grade Home Ec where we took an entire semester to make an apron.
An elderly friend and I created aprons from gingham fabric by folding and cross-stitching every seam. Some sections required the use of a thimble. The ultimate no-waste project.
My mother used to make these pictures using gravel and black cord. You would outline the shapes with the cord and then fill in the spaces with different colored gravel. I had to be around three when I realized she did this but I do remember two pictures of jesters. I loved that stuff. She used to let me help her. What do you call this? Gravel mosaics? I-don’t-have-a-fish-tank-but-I-like-gravel craft?
Folding hats out of newspaper.
And I-don’t-even-know-what-to-call-them-sort of origami-ish squares with pockets to put your index fingers and thumbs to open and close, and use to answer questions.
Gosh, I haven’t thought of that in years.
This was called “Stonette.” My father did them too. We had some of those Bahamian dancer type pictures in our living room.
When I was in high school (when dinosaurs roamed the earth), our 4-H club made a Christmas tree from tuna cans with both ends removed, the outsides covered with green felt and trimmed with gold braid, squished to make ovals and glued together. A single, tiny gold ball on a thin wire hung from the top of each oval. It was lovely and we felt so clever to create such a pretty thing!
Remember Pac o Fun magazine and The Workbasket?? I loved paging thru them and deciding which project I might be able to do. My grandmother was a crochet whiz, but never knitted. And darn it, every pattern I wanted was knitted. I got the idea that knitting was hard from that experience. And nowadays, I am looking for knit patterns every day that add to my skill level. Thanks to my Gram for the inspiration!!
Potholders made with purchased loops stretched and woven on the red metal frame. My Mom taught me to knit when I was around 10 yrs. old,
I did love the potholders!
Someone gave us two big bottles of tempura paint, one blue and one red. We painted every rock and brick and cinderblock available to us so that our refrigerator box house had a phone and stereo and furniture. It was a great hang out until the first big rainstorm.
Where to begin? Gum wrapper chains by the yard. Decopauge a black lunch box. My eight grade group project of creating an Iroquois village of long houses with paper mache. My aunt teaching me to make beaded flowers (with those tiny beads). I never realized I was so crafty even then.
My three sisters and I loved to make furniture and clothes for our Little Women dolls, with cardboard boxes and felt and embroidery thread. Our playtime consisted of 90% setup negotiations and crafting, and 10% actual play. Then it was time for a snack of popsicles (saved the sticks) and Juicy gum (ate the sticks).
I think my favorite childhood craft was definitely potholder making. I went through a 2-3 year period where I made hundreds of them!
My babysitter taught me to cross-stitch when I was about 8 or 9. Grandma tried to teach me to embroider but I never could get my stitches nice….still can’t. So the cross-stitch was perfect.
I loved making pomander balls by covering oranges with cloves. Then they were rolled in spices and wrapped in newspaper to dry out. The final step was to put them in pretty colored netting and tie a beautiful bow
at the top. It was then ready to give away.
It was fit for a queen.
I remember making candles by pouring melted wax into empty milk cartons of various sizes and strategically placing ice cubes (for holes as design elements) and crayon shavings for color in the newly poured candle. One never knew quite how the candle would.look until after the melted cubes and cardboard mold were removed.
Bracelets made from colorful old telephone wire. Latch hook pillows that never quite got finished. Paint-by-numbers. Whittled little cowboy boots made from a small tree branch using Grandpa’s pocket knife was the highlight of a summer afternoon.
I remember making potholders out of those looms. Also using shoeboxes to make Barbie furniture.
I loved making gum wrapper chains and weaving potholders!
Yes! I used to have a knitting group at my old job. I miss it!!!!
I loved making beaded bracelets with safety pins. I made a bunch of those and even figured out how to spell “Bama” on my bracelet. Roll tide!
I used to make woven ‘sit-upons’ out of folded strips of newspapers. It was a Girl Scout project. They make great, somewhat insulated, bottom protectors when sitting on the ground around a campfire.
I liked to pick up pretty leaves in the fall and iron them between two sheets of waxed paper. Low-tech, except for the iron, which was, even then, electric.
Yay for Camp Fire Girls! That’s where I learned to knit! I still have all the wooden beads I earned, though maybe it’s time to pass them on to my granddaughter for her craft projects.
Toilet paper doll clothes. Turned my love of sewing and fashion
Making Easter eggs: sometimes blowing them hollow (takes skillz), more often using hard-boiled eggs. Loved the unexpected colors, aiming for pastel delicacy but often going into deeper tones. The occasional use of resists, like rubber bands, to get a pattern…good times
Well, this time of year, I am remembering decorating a gingerbread house and Christmas cookies as my favorite childhood craft. It can be considered a craft, can it not? I am attempting to pass that experience on to my grand children. The delicious aroma of ginger, cinnamon, peppermint, and other spices fills the house. ‘Tis the season!
I loved making “stained glass” with waxed paper and crayon shavings. It was so much fun to iron the brown paper bag and then let it cool to see if your design held.
It has to be gimp! Remember all the key chains, bracelets, etc.?
One Christmas a girlfriend and I took on an ambitious project decorating candles with sequins with pins that we had my dad cut so the pins wouldn’t go thru the candle. We went door to door in our neighborhood selling them! I have no idea how much we offered them for but that was so FUN!
Gimp bracelets, soaking yarn or string in paste and wrapping inflated balloon until the yarn was dry and deflating the balloon. Making sand candles by filling a pail with wet sand then digging out the center and poking your fingers in the sides then pouring in melted wax, let cool and untold. Making play dog from water, flour and salt and cutting out the shapes with cookie cutters and letting them dry before painting.
My mother would get me doll making kits. I think they were called Lil Missy. The kit had a styrofoam bell shaped body, tiny doll head, some cloth, pushpins, beads and sequins. My father would get the head on and the fabric for the bodice of the dress. Pinning the sequins into the body was my job and the best part! I had a Bo Peep version and one with lots of gold sequins.
I loved making silver Christmas ornaments using hammer and nail to punch holes in a silver circle from the end of a frozen juice can. I had pictures of candy canes, holly leaves, bells, an angel with holes on the drawn picture showing where to put the nail holes. I made another hole at the top to put a small string or ribbon to hang on the tree. The tree lights shown on that silver, and I felt it was magical.
My mom loved doing crafts so we often had seasonal activities as described in magazines like McCall’s. One of the best was painting our big living room window with water soluble paints, a nativity scene following a grid from a magazine. Quite impressive as I recall.
Paper crafts: snowflakes, placemats, fancy place cards, booklets, valentines, baskets
Sand paint by numbers from a kit from my gramma: put white glue on the picture, then sprinkle colored sand over the glue. Shake off what doesn’t stick. My kids had a glitter version of this that was infinitely messier somehow.
I did just about all the crafts but one of my passions as a pre-teen was making beaded dolls. They came in kits with little bits of fabric and felt and beads and other whatnot with a foam base and a plastic head. The designs were often representative of costumes from cultures all over the world. I’ve not seen anything like these in decades.
Lanyards, keychains bookmarks…….. all out of plastic gimp
I loved making those chains you make out of chewing gum wrappers
My knitting crafts were rectangles that became stiles, rugs, blankets and aprons for my Barbie dolls, but I also enjoyed making potholders with the square looms and fabric loops.
My favorite craft from childhood was wire crafts. We made rings and bracelets from lots of colorful wires wrapped around each other.
There are so many that it’s hard to pick one. Let’s see, we used to pour plaster of Paris in molds to harden. Once hardened, we’d pop them out and paint them. Decoupage was very popular. Making lanyards from plastic cords. So much fun!!
Tissue paper flowers for some reason where big in my house.
Maybe I’m just in the holiday spirit, but I immediately thought of folding Readers Digests into Christmas trees.
Gum wrapper chain! All the Juicy Fruit, Double Mint (it’s two, two, two gums in one!) and probably others that I can’t remember. It was many feet long and I hung it all around the edge of my bedroom ceiling. Good times.
Making potholders on a loom.
Lanyards! I even covered a hanger with a lanyard braid once. Then there was an issue of some crafts magazine with finger puppets. I went crazy with making knitted finger puppets for a time, then my granny sold them all at some church sale. One had a paper umbrella, one had a sword the size of a toothpick.
I loved making outfits cut from felt for my family of trolls!
OK. I was a weird kid. I loved painting human anatomy models–the Visible Man and the Visible Woman. All the blood vessels in red and blue, the liver in a shiny brown, pink guts, red spleen. And the Visible Woman had an alternate pregnant belly with a meaty red uterus and a little bean of a baby inside. I was probably the only kid on the block that knew where the pancreas was and had painted one yellow!
Weaving potholders. Lots and lots of potholders!
Miles of spool knitting but I don’t recall it ever becoming anything other than a “rope.” Potholder weaving. Learning to sew. Painting and crocheting but never learned to knit as a child. Started a craze in sixth grade by making a “paper” doll from the plastic of a washed out bleach jug then making clothes and wigs from fabric and felt. I hadn’t thought about that in years!
We would make May baskets on May first out of the green plastic strawberry baskets. We’d weave ribbon through the holes and make a ribbon handle, and go pick flowers from all the gardens and violets from the empty lot, and maybe add a daisy chain braided from clover flowers. We’d wait until after dark, put a basket on the front doorstep of the neighbors we liked, ring the bell, run and hide, and watch them be surprised and pleased. Happy childhood memories.
Chains with gum wrappers, both paper and foil wrappers. I remember the cool teenagers in my childhood neighborhood making them while chewing gum noisily: chewing with their mouth open, snapping bubbles, singing the latest Beatles or Herman’s Hermit hits playing over someone’s transistor radio. At first, I was allowed to do the preliminary folds to hand to off to a teenager who knew the secret to linking the pieces together. When I finally mastered that final fold and linking process, I felt so cool! One time we all saved wrappers for some period of time and made a chain long enough to circle the whole group and then some. The only issue we ever had was who got to take the chain home!
Sorry. Not weird .
Favorite childhood craft was making potholders! I still have the loom and I still use some of the potholders I made. That is probably the weird part since I am now on Medicare! I am old.
Lanyards in the worst possible plastic color combinations.
♀️Remember theorst: holiday bells made with can lids. Cut in 4 sections, first grade. Yes, I do have the scars.
potholders to sell and embroidering flowers on my jeans and shirts were my favs!
No juicy fruit or gum wrappers. I liked sewing clothes for my Troll dolls. I used felt with a needle and thread to make dresses and hats and vests and pants. I kept them in a cigar box. I still have it all!!
Oh my gosh! The memories invoked by the mention of Juicy Fruit! My friend and I would store all our wrappers (Juicy Fruit, Doublemint, Fruitstripe) in brown paper lunch bags under our beds. Then we’d take them to school and spend lunch recess making chain links.
Collages from magazine pictures, we’d find letters to create funny dialog bubbles; so many potholders; paper snowflakes to hang in the winter; decoupage; pompoms all the time; dyeing tshirts with koolaid (they did smell like juice!); koolaid popsicles with a plastic set of popsicle shapes; folded gum chains. When we got bored with crafting, we’d pull out the long string and play cat’s cradle. Aaaaaah, the 1970s….
My dad taught us boondoggling! My favorite was the square one. We made key chains, zipper pulls and lanyards.
Knitting a long strip to make a headband.
Long garter stitch strips with no purpose. Loved knitting but no one to show me how to really make anything.
Making things out of Play Dough. I loved the smell of it, too.
OMG – we did all the crafts! I was a Girl Scout and came from a very crafty family, so our crafts were all over the place. Probably the most consistent was loom-woven potholders and knitting very wonky – er, avant garde – outfits for my dolls.
I loved doing sponged window stencils.
I used to make scenes in shoe boxes with little cut out figures and painted scenery. Then there was a little hole cut in the lid to let some light in and a peep hole cut in one end. Whenever I got new shoes I always made one of these!
Lots of crafts but I lived making things out of balsa wood, then painting them with tempura paints.
Mom would buy me embroidery kits. The kind that were printed on the linen, and never really lined up with the fibers, so it was hard to do a proper satin stitch. My Girl Scout first embroidery lesson used huck fabric. The perfectly spaced parallel raised fibers made decorating with embroidery floss symmetrical. We could invent any pattern with any and all amazing colors. Guest towels for all for Christmas.
Wow, so many lovely memories in these comments. I enjoyed needlepoint kits, covering wire coat hangers-perhaps this was macrame? My world changed when I learned to sew with sewing machine in Jr High. I was never without a project!
Lanyards AND copper rubbing. Our local craft store had them as kits. I loved seeing the design emerge. At least that’s how I remember it. It was back in the Fifties and was all the rage in our neighborhood. It definitely involved copper sheets. That I know.
For some reason we were celebrating Dutch culture in Girl Scouts, maybe an International Day? We needed to craft “wooden shoes”. Using newspapers and masking tape, we converted old shoes to achieve the goal. Can’t recall smells, though.
While mine doesn’t smell like popsicles, it does use popsicle sticks. My brothers and I used to take Mom’s leftover fabric & yarn bits along with our popsicle sticks and weave little God’s Eye decorations.
We would make them for all the holidays – adding hearts, clovers or leaves to the corners, stars & red/white/blue colors. Mom always had some of our creations hanging in the kitchen window.
But the best ones were the fancy ones we would make at Christmas for our tree and those of our Grandparents using bits of tinsel or shiny garland.
Sand Art in empty bottles (early recycling)
My favorite childhood craft….making mile long paper chains and little wallets/purses from folded gum wrappers!
In Girl Scouts, we made paper mache with torn newspapers, flour, and water. We pasted the strips of newspaper on a blown-up balloon to make something that resembled a lantern. When it was dry we painted it, applied glitter, and hung it in a doorway.
My mom took a ceramics class every Wednesday evening and when I was very lucky I got to go with her and paint an ornament of my own choosing. It was exciting to be out with just my mom and talk with all those grown up ladies (and stay up past my bedtime).
We made sit-upons in Girl Scouts, too! And we did crafts at home all the time – potholders, spool knitting, mosaic tile ashtrays (!), paper chains, paper snowflakes, homemade bean bags. The craft I always thought was the weirdest was string art – wrapping string around little nails to make pictures.
As a kid, I liked making very small articles of clothing for very small dolls – like 5″ tall dolls. Once I made a doll 7 pairs of underwear – one for every day of the week. Just in case she wanted to freshen up every morning I guess. And the underwear was made of felt because I was still learning how to sew and couldn’t handle turning under a tiny hem yet. But they were lace trimmed. I never actually played with the dolls, I just like to make them things or re-upholster the doll house sofa or wallpaper the kitchen or make a beaded curtain for a room divider. I still really like to make small things.
my most loved craft was making beads out of pine nuts foraged and sanded down with the cement walkway. loved the process but even more the beautiful beads from found nuts.
We made book Mark’s by cutting the corners off old envelopes and decorated them. I learned this from watching Captain Kangaroo. My kids and grandchildren also made them and took them to the Library.
Knitting was my favorite craft as a child. My mother would get me inexpensive multi colored yarn, as I knitted away the colors became characters each with their own story.
Believe it or not, my favorite craft was knitting. IF that counts as a craft! My first project was a one inch by maybe six inch garter stitch book mark.
Gum wrapper chains! I just made a short one out of some foil French cookie wrappers…short because a dozen or so got tossed before I remembered chains. Everyone I mentioned it to had never heard of them and thought I was nuts. Nope, just older. We were easily entertained back then…now I knit!
Learning to use a jigsaw in my dad’s workshop to make dollhouse furniture, when I was in jr high!
Hook rug with a hooking needle. It was an owl……very 60s
yes, spool knitting, variegated wool, enough for an entire hat when sewn together
Wheat weaving! We moved from Canada to Kansas and I was amazed that wheat could be a Girl Scout craft time activity.
I loved making patchwork calico ornaments. You used a styrofoam base as a shape, and then pushed the edges of the fabric into the styrofoam to make a 3D sort of quilted looking thingy. I also LOVED the thing where you put masking tape on a bottle in bits and pieces and then used shoe polish over the tape to give it texture and make it look kind of like leather……. And of course potholders. I could go on and on (“sit upons” with whipstitches through holes punched along the edge of waterproof fabric, dunk bags made of dish cloths sewn together to dip all your dishes, latch hook that I never finished, embroidery, etc.). I was a 70s kid. There were LOTS of crafts and the “homemade” aesthetic fit right in.
Origami was my favorite childhood craft, since there was always scraps of paper to be found. Gum wrapper chains too. Do kids do that anymore?
Anyone else remember copper enameling? We’d make designs with powdered glass on copper forms (cufflinks, etc.), then melt the glass in a tiny kiln. Parents and friends soon got tired of all the copper gifts. A few years ago, a jewelry-making friend “discovered” this art (I don’t remember what she calls it now) and includes it in her high-end necklaces and bracelets.
My favorite was embroidery. I am tempted to take it up again but I have so much knitting!
Making prints with carved potatoes or linoleum. Do kids still do that?
Sewing pockets and little pillows was my first craft love. I could not sew enough little pockets with my great-grandmother’s scraps. She also tried to teach me to knit. Imagine her surprise when came home for Christmas after moving away to tell her that some new friends taught me to knit!
My sister and I made Doll furniture from all kinds of scrap materials. We use everything from yarn to paper to make the doll furniture.
Christmas craft, making paper chains and cutting snowflakes from folded paper.
I have fond memories of my sister and I making Fun Flowers and bugs (Kudos to my parents for getting their two girls the flowers AND the bugs!). We mixed up some likely toxic ingredients and poured them in molds and then “baked” them on the little hot plate included in the kit. We knew they were ready when we smelled that nice burning plastic smell!
Ahh, Creepy Crawlers, Fun Flowers, and burns on our hands! The good old days!
My mom was an elementary school teacher, so crafting was a normal occurrence at our house. One year I made about a billion ornaments from baby food jar lids and old Christmas cards – cut out a picture from the card, glue it inside the lid, repeat on another lid, then stick them together back-to-back with a loop of string stuck on there too. I think my mom probably still has a few of them.
I had a crafty mom and she was my Girl Scout leader so lots of learning on how to make things and lots of campfire cooking. I think I tried about all the crafts mention so far with the exception of the gum wrapper chain. We lived seven miles from the nearest town which made it difficult to spend our allowance money but that did not stop one of my brothers from getting chewing gum. Once my mother found out he was parking the used gum under the edge of the wooden dinning room table all gum was banned from the house. I don’t think any of of us kids ( four of us) developed a chewing gum habit or even a candy habit now that I think about it.
My favorite craft was making paper mache bracelets and napkin rings out of toilet paper cardboard tubes, using leftover strips of newspapers and glue made from flour and water. After they dried, we would use leftover paint from dad’s tool house. Such a fun mess!
Making dolls from craft sticks with yarn hair and fabric scrap clothes
What a fun thread! I loved making little pots and bowls out of clay and water at the edge of my best friend’s pond. We dried them on the dock and used them with our dolls and whatnot. Or we’d smash mud into a mess. That was fun, too.
Funny to think that when I resigned from a corporate job, I signed up for pottery classes!
It’s not particularly weird, but I have very fond memories of gingerbread cutout ornaments–a salt-dough spinoff made with applesauce and packed with spices, even 25 years later they still give off a faint whiff of that cozy aroma!
I don’t have any specific memories of crafting as a kid. However, I really need to comment on the idea of a work community knitting project. I LOVE that idea. Litigation blanket for the win!
Reading all of the comments brings back so many memories! My favorite was probably weaving potholders.
My favorite early childhood craft was hand sewing, as evidenced by attaching a masterpiece that I was sewing to my nightgown by accident. I’d held nightgown and sewing block together, apparently, and when I went to wake my mom and show her, poof, it was a part of me.
I loved making those gum wrapper chains. I must have chewed lots of gum.
My favourite past time was using up all the leftovers from my Mum’s sewing, felt, ribbon, wool, material, tying and sewing them into little weird animals to decorate my pencils. I think she left a few extras ‘accidentally’. I miss her still.x
Hoping it’s ok to comment again because I just remembered making red Christmas stockings out of felt. I attached cut-out felt pieces (s/a sleigh, deer, houses, etc) with shiny threads and different kinds of beads/pearls/buttons that my Mom had in her craft supplies. Oh yes, and added names at the top with sequins.
I can remember how much fun it was to make up different ‘themes’ on each stocking.Think this is a craft I need to show my g-grands.
….and I have a huge craft box of beads and threads for them to use.
When my best friend and I were 12 and 11, respectively, we invented a world of hand-stitched stuffed felt characters we called Gnoolies.
Gnoolies were about an inch and a half square (or rectangle) and had only stitched-on felt eyes. They came, of course, in all colors.
We wrote illustrated books about our Gnoolies adventures. We crafted fully furnished homes for the Gnoolies out of cardboard, card stock, paper, and pretty much every other material. We spent ever second of our “free time” at school creating multitudes of tiny books, dishes, food stuffs, blankets, paintings, and anything else we could dream up to keep our Gnoolies amused.
After a month or so, other (younger) kids in the school began making knock-off Gnoolies and Gnoolie homes. It was around this time that we lost interest and started gluing layers upon layers of multi-colored construction paper cut into shapes like hearts and stars, then sanding down the edges to round them off and show off the rainbow layers. A few layers of shellac were added to finish them off. They were completely useless, but super cool.
Yeah, I was a crafty kid since as far back as I can remember. It never left me. (thank goodness!)
One of my favorite things to make was daisy chains. Even though they were a fleeting craft, it was such fun to sit on a patch of grass, pick weeds and make the chains to wear as bracelets, necklaces, crowns and anklets. It was one of the first steps to have great fun in the world of make believe.
I also would walk to the library land stop at the woolworths and buy felt squares and embroidery floss. I would sew the squares together, add yarn handles and make purses. Then I would very proudly carry my purse to the library the next week. My mother was not at all crafty, but I loved girl scouts, making moccasins and wallets with the kits. In HS a friend of mine did the cartoons for the school paper. I would have him draw a character on a denim shirt and I would embroider it. It was the 70’s and they were very cool, such as a crazy mouse on skis. Still have the shirts!
loom potholders
Several years ago I remembered about gum wrapper chains. I recall trying to do it again. I think I remembered how to make them. I also did whittling as a kid. I made a few links of chain but had to glue some back together as I cracked them trying to open up the inner spaces. I made a pendant piece of Jonathan Livingston Seagull in cherry wood of which I was pretty proud.That tells you my approximate age, lol. I still have it.
OMG. I haven’t thought about this in years, but my favorite craft as a teenager was making woven beaded bracelets. Everybody wanted one, even the guys, and I always finished them up on the recipient. No taking that puppy off. Met a lot of new people doing that.
I oved all kinds of crafts. One I liked was making candles as a teacher gift. I’d take a 1/4 gallon milk carton (the paper kind), put a red taper candle in the center and then fill it with cracked ice. Then I’d melt a block of wax, the kind you used to get at grocery stores for canning and pour it over the ice, filling the carton almost to the brim. Once the wax had cooled, I’d pour out the water and peel off the carton and Voila, a lovely candle.
My favorite childhood craft was making god’s eye ornaments with popsicle sticks and yarn scraps. Back then we actually saved our popsicle sticks to be able to make them, LOL.
I remember making chains out of chewing gum wrappers and making beads from rolled strips of newspaper.
Gum wrapper bracelets and of course, potholders!
Dyeing Easter eggs–the smell of hot vinegar still reminds me of Easter!
I loved crafting from when I was little. One project I remember was making a goldfish. I hadn’t won one at the local carnival, so the next day I made one out of paper & wrapped it in plastic wrap, in the hopes it would survive in a bowl of water.
Our favorite stories about crafting are the dangerous ones. My sister recounts bringing a lightbulb to school, covering it with paper mache then breaking it to make a maracas. Encouraging children to play with broken glass. I wanted the kit that you made jewelry with marbles in a pan and then dropped them in ice water to crack and make jewels. And thanks to Janet Berstein who taught me to knit with her pencils and some of her yarn during 6th grade recesses, foiled by extremely cold weather.
All sorts of crafts, from loop-woven potholders to crocheted Christmas stockings for my younger cousins.
Sorry, no Juicy Fruit! Potholders!
I used to make folded gum wrapper chains!
My favorite childhood craft was making gimp bracelets and keychains!
Popsicle stick and yarn “god’s eye” ornaments. This is especially ironic because my parents raised me without religion.
I had several. The first was making bracelets by folding chewing gum wrappers somehow and interlocking them to make a chain. The other was making potholders with the frame and stretchy loops.
I loved the crafts I learned in Girl Scouts. A sit-upon and a key holder for my Dad that still hangs I my house. And I taught myself to knit, mostly bookmarks!
we made boats out of scrap wood, carved snowmen out of soap, styrofoam snowmen, woven pot holders that my mom sewed into an area rug, Shrinky Dinks, “stained glass” sun catchers, hook rugs, so much fun!
I was a Crocheter from way back in the day. I used to make clothes for my dolls.
I grew up in a small house with 6 younger sisters. I’d love to sit on my top bunk, embroidering with crewel yarn using different stitches. I loved getting those kits for Christmas. The whole picture was done in thread, not just accents on a printed canvas. You can’t find them anymore, sigh.
And, I loved to color. It was a really big deal to get a box of Crayola crayons – 64 pack and I still remember my first set of “Magic Markers”, there were only 5 colors!
I made ink out of Blueberries and whittled a pencil out of a twig per instructions in my favorite activity book, Kids America. It also taught palm reading.
I, too, loved knitting on a spool with nails! I remember making long ropes with grand pland to coil the ropes to make mats. That part never happened, but the act of creating the ropes was such a pleasure in itself.
I had a Knitty Jenny!
I loved making corn starch/baking soda clay to sculpt little creatures.
One year at camp, we made flowers out of bent wire and some type of semi clear plastic. I’m sure it was pretty toxic (it was the 70s!) but I was so proud of those flowers!
Oh! After reading all these wonderful comments I’ve remembered the wonderful “carnations” we made out of tissues. We’d fold tissues back and forth, like making a fan. Then stack the folded tissues and tie them tighly with a string. We carefully pulled out each individual layer and ended up with a “beautiful” fluffy, full carnation! All the better if the tissues were scented. Thanks to all of you for all the smiles of remembrence!
I remember making animals with bouncy legs made out of strips of folded paper. Turning two strips of paper into a spring = magic!!
Gimp bracelets and a lanyard for my roller skate key. Tray favors for the hospital in Girl Scouts. What fun!
I remember PlayDoh. Oh and SillyPutty and the Sunday Comics.
I loved the little mosaic kits-a small metal plate or bowl or !ashtray! And tiny tiles, adhesive and grout. I wish I knew what happened to all the treasures I produced!
Favorite childhood craft- making pop up cards from stiff paper and painting them with nail polish! I was a bit of a magpie when it came to crafts. I used whatever I had.
In Girl Scouts we made Christmas trees out of Readers Digest magazines. Folding every page and spray painting them green.
Kenner “Thingmaker” had a block heater and a set of metal mould plates to let me cook up a bunch of polymer bugs and flowers and butterflies in psychedelic 70s colors- and they stuck to mirrors and glass really well! Of course there was also candle making and knitting and making paint from eggs and ground shale or clay in the roadcuts. …and paper beads.
As I think of all the crafts I did as a kid I still think it’s knitting and crocheting. Maybe because of the memories of the women who taught me!
My mother insisted that we make all the holiday gifts for friends. (Actually – every last gift ever given was handmade right down to my father learning to make pottery for something specific.) We toured craft shows until we were inspired to make something and then she helped us make whatever it was in multiples. Mine usually involved baking. (I once made 16 dog-safe gingerbread “dog houses” to give to family friends.)
I had a book called “Make It Yourself,” and I still have it today, 60 years later. In it, it suggested using items one could find around the house, like an empty cardboard oatmeal container, popsicle sticks (before you could buy new ones), empty toilet paper rolls and tissue paper. My favorite craft for a long time was to fold a kleenex sheet into a fan shape and pinch it in the middle with a pipe cleaner. Then, you pinched the edges off to make a very irregular edging on each and every layer—this took a while. At last, it was time to spread out each layer of the fan, bringing them towards the middle. And then, magic! You had made a carnation with a pipe cleaner stem. I thought these flowers were beautiful and could never believe I could actually make them : ).
Latch hooking, tissue paper flowers, and anything involving painting. Loved all the crafts!
I was in a girls craft club at the local library. I liked making anything that the librarian dreamed up. Nylon stocking Santa in a burlap sack, basket weave paper hearts for Valentine’s day, Mrs. Tiggy Winkle from teasel plants etc.
I loved making snowball ornaments by pulling string through plaster of Paris and winding it around a small round inflated balloon. We popped the balloon when the plaster was dry, tied a ribbon through an open spot, and voila, a beautiful lacy snowball ornament!
I made friendship bracelets with DMC thread and SOLD them to my friends on the playground! Haha
Two things! I made necklaces out of clover found in the front yard. For the other, I drew a scribble on paper, then used crayons to fill in the sections…very thick layers of waxy crayon. Then I painted over the whole thing with black or dark blue tempera paint. When it was dry, I used a sharp pointed instrument to draw a design (fireworks, flowers, whatever I wanted). It was so much fun to see the colors emerge!
At summer camp we used to make necklaces out of these little white wildflowers that pop up in the Midwest in summer. They were lovely.
Sewing my own clothes. Some were especially weird! Like the bright orange and white print culotte dress I made to wear to my eighth grade choir concert. I was so proud!
I did all the things, but remember I was deeply into latch hooking at one point.
Favorite craft from childhood HAS to be making (and selling) potholders. I had an old school, heavy metal potholder loom and a little brown vinyl suitcase where it and LOADS of loops were stored. Much to my mother’s embarrassment, I went door to door in our neighborhood selling pairs of potholders for fifty cents! Naturally when I saw a similar loom and loops at a local garage sale a few years ago, I snapped that bargain up – $3.00 for everything!
I remember embroidering pillow cases and dish towels. I also liked my Spirograph!
I drew a lot because I could always get paper and pencils. My folks were not crafters, so they didn’t encourage or support anything not entirely “practical”. And if it made a mess, forget it! Now as an adult I knit, and also sew tiny felt critters. And now am newly obsessed with pom pom crafts!
Loved knitting when I was young, love it now…thanks for the giveaway!
I think back to doublemint gum. Folding the wrappers ( not the foil, as that had an entirely different purpose) in half and again…then folding both ends in to the middle. These pieces were attached end to end to make a doublemint Rick-Rack. I had strings all over. Sometimes I would be brazen and throw in a juicy fruit or clove as an accent color.
My mom had six kids and worked in a family business. Crafts were not high on the list of things we did at home! But in the summer we lived on a lake with shale beach stones and I would collect the big ones, drag out some old paint and brushes from the basement and make a pretty rudimentary daisy of funny face! Thankfully my mom was a knitter and she relaxed with a group of her women friends in a knitting group in the winter. It’s where I learned to knit and happily I am better at knitting than I w as as a young “artist”!
Carol M
Favorite craft from my childhood would be putting bits of flowers / leaves into books to ‘press’ them. I am still finding bits of ‘foliage’ in some of my childhood books 🙂
As a small child, my beloved Aunt Marion (an elementary school teacher) would keep my sister and I busy glueing dry pasta, in a variety of shapes, onto jars. Between visits, she would spray paint them for us, and we would be thrilled to see our efforts made magical by the silver or gold spray paint. She gifted me with a macramé kit for Christmas one year and that ignited several years of devotes macramé-making. Such happy memories!
We lived near a tape factory in MA, and my sisters and friends and I would delight in going to the factory door, where we would be given castoff rolls of adhesive tape. From these, we would fashion toys, dolls, and always ” gifts’ we thought our mother could use. Many summer afternoons involved a walk to the factory.
I loved making woven potholders on my best friends plastic form and stretchy colorful loops!!
Spool knitting. Then plastic flat cords somehow woven into squared-off zipper pulls etc.
Hmm, favorite craft from my childhood… I don’t know if this counts, but I used to obsessively mold Poster Putty (does anyone still use this?) into the shape of a schnauzer. Sometimes I’d experiment with other critters, other shapes, but I always returned to the schnauzer. ::Shrug::
Hmmm… as a child my favorite craft?
I did not know I was artistic until approximately 8th grade. Early on, I was quite skilled in constructing realistic houses, towns and battlefields out of twigs and the earth. I would build and play for hours while hoping my brother wouldn’t find out I have his toy soldiers and little trucks an cars.
Later, I delved into poetry approximately at 6th grade level, my writing’s included a play.
But it was my eighth grade year that I saw a classmate wearing a Shift (dating my era), that her mother had made. It was then that I parked myself behind my mothers pedal Singer and taught myself to sew.
Within 2 years I was drawing patterns onto newspaper and creating my own designs.
Around 9th grade I began my trek into art, watercolors being my choice medium, then into pastels.
Now, as a content senior I so enjoy too many areas within the craftworks fields.
Now, if only I could sing… well, I’ll leave that one to my daughter.
As a kid, my dad would take me to the basement workshop and give me cutoffs of wood, a hammer, nails and a smooth piece of scrap wood. I spent hours pounding sculptures together!! Sometimes I’d get to paint first, then put together. Sometimes I’d get to paint later. And I learned to take them apart and recreate.
While I really enjoyed making the gum wrapper chains, I LOVED loved making pot holders with the loops…my earliest introduction to weaving.
I enjoyed (and still do) the creative process which is messy esp without any “training”. I really love making and giving my creations to people I love. So earrings quilts scarves etc. When I learned how to sew in middle school I made this red purse for my little sister with crazy quilted strap and embroidered a tree with a swing and her swinging with her long braids freely moving. I love thinking of the person I’m creating for as well. 50+ years later, she still has it and we’re much closer now than then.
Does making play houses out of cardboard appliance boxes count as a “craft”? My father was an electrician who worked on new residential houses so he would bring home the boxes that stoves, washers, dryers, etc. came in. I don’t remember using a box cutter to cut out windows and doors. I’m imaging that Dad did that, he was a responsible parent. We used magic markers to draw windowpanes, door knobs, shutters, etc.
Making striped candles from melted crayons. And painting small things. I remember having a green and blue geometric floral on white wallpaper in my room, and painting the dot centers of each flower with some kind of paint that glowed wildly when I turned on my black light.
Sadly not Juicy Fruit flavored, but I love to make potholders on my little loop weaving square.
Dippity Glass flowers and macrame!
I loved to braid. We had really thin strips of some type of plastic (about 1/8″ wide.) It came on a spool – some was flat and some was round. We braided all sorts of stuff – leashes, car key fobs, necklaces. We could braid in a spiral, in a square, or just like a hair braid. And it came in all sorts of colors so you could make really spectacular stuff. It may not have smelled like Juicy Fruit or popsicles but our breath probably did!
favorite childhood craft: dolls made out of paper disks
Like everyone else, I had the spool, yarn, potholder thing going. But when I was quite small, my mother used to trace coloring book pages for my brother and I to embroider with big needles and floss…that’s when we wern’t coloring the designs on paper napkins for the dinner table 🙂
Beads on safety pins for shoe laces and designs. hopefully that counts as a craft
I was always fascinated by the things that people made with the flat plastic cord. No idea what it was called, but it came in cool colors and you could make lanyards or bracelets or just about anything. Wonder if they still sell it somewhere……………running to check Google.
Old enough to understand the Juicyfruit reference….we made long, long chains of discarded gum wrappers. As a kid though, I loved making potholders on the square looms with cotton loops. So much so that I purchased a loom a year or two ago and revisited this crafty hobby. Happy to report I still love it all these many years later.
Loop potholders and macrame – I’m a child of the 70’s 🙂
Still love the loom weaving of potholders- thanks to your gift set ….
I loved rug hooking. Also making jewelry by poking holes in kernels of dried corn so they could be strung as beads.
My Mom taught me to knit, crochet and sew, which meant I was always making something for my Barbie dolls. Scarves were also a great knitting project.
I loved the beaded ornament kits my mom would allow us to make each Christmas. I still have one of mine from childhood on my tree.
Shrinky Dinks
My cousin taught me to knit when I was 6, and since her mother came from Russia, I learned to knit that way and it’s been a constant joy. But the crafts that have stayed with me and evolved all have to do with paper. In the fifties, we got to do paper crafts in elementary school, not just on “art” day. Public television introduced me to origami when I was 11 or so, and just lately, I’ve discovered and artist, Paula Krieg, who teaches wonderful things online. I could go on and on. (Obviously!)
Splatter painting. Put a big ol’ maple leaf on a piece of paper, get your piece of screen, a toothbrush and acrylic paint. Put some non runny paint on the screen and run the toothbrush over to splatter paint EVERYWHERE Lift off the leaf when the paint has dried. Beauty!
Favorite childhood craft – Oh my gosh there are so many because I grew up around so many crafty people! Making corn husk dolls, making candles, learning macrame, weaving friendship bracelets and the list goes on. But my favorite has to be learning to embroider – sitting on the sofa next to my grandmother and watching her make the stitches. Then she would hand the piece over to me and talk me through making the stitches myself – french knots, chain stitches, back stitches, satin stitches…it was the best.
A favorite craft was making belts from pop tops from soda cans!
Making things from homemade dough clay was a favorite. Not odd, but fun!
Only one! Well, I’m from New Orleans; making Mardi Gras floats from shoe boxes , crepe paper and beads. Box upside down with the top as the rising back of the float. anyone else out there remember making these? And my second favorite was making snow globes with glycerine, glitter and little figures; as a Southerner, snow was always mysterious and magical.
My childhood craft (I tried everything) that was the oddest was making bracelets from tinfoil picked up along the one mile stretch of road between my home and the local spot to swim. I picked up foil from cigarette packs and from candy bars (this is 1955-1957, age 5-7, when the products mentioned were made of real tinfoil and you could peel off the paper backing). The rest you can find on Pinterest though most people used gum wrappers. It involves folding and pushing one bit through another to make a zig-zag chain. I, literally, made metres of this stuff! My second oddest hobby involved finding flat and fairly thin pieces of slate and (when my mother wasn’t watching) old pieces of broken glass and slowly carving designs or holes in the rock. I was an odd child but happy!
As I was outgrowing my potholder phase, my cousin worked for C&P Telephone and he would give me odds and ends of colorful telephone wire. Some of the wires were even striped! I twisted it in to all sorts of jewelry and sold it – probably for a nickel a piece. Great memories!
We would cut/carve boats out of scrap wood and throw them in the creek next to our house to have “boat races”
My grandmother taught me to crochet handkerchief edgings, then later to make paper Moravian stars. In the second grade the whole class made Weave-it squares, which the teacher then made into beautiful afghans. She provided the yarn.
My favorite craft growing up was painting ceramics. My mom and I joined a ceramics club when I was 10; we were the only two members under 75 (and it took a lot of convincing on my mom’s part for me to be allowed to join). They were spunky and hilarious and very affectionate towards me (after it became apparent that I wasn’t going to break everything in the shop) so every week it was like going to hang out with 10 of my favorite grandma’s. 20+ years on, every time I see a ceramics painting shop, I think of them and smile.
I was soooo lucky! I had a succession of sitters who were elderly immigrants. They taught me to knit, sew, quilt, cook, clean (ugh), mend, embroider, tend to cuts and burns, read, etc. I will forever be indebted to Mrs. Tocci (Italian), Mrs. Logan (Scottish) and Mrs. Sonya (Mexican). May they rest in love and peace.
favorite craft from childhood — making toys with my friends; I made puppets with one friend, Barbie doll house furniture and clothes with another; pompoms that we turned into little creatures with a third. All of them were creative collaborations and after making them we played with them. So much fun!
I made Christmas ornaments of a felt mouse sleeping in a walnut shell. I loved working clay.
A craft project learned in childhood and never used since is braided keychain making. This was in summer camp and I can still remember the unique stench of the offgassing (pleather? vinyl?) strips. How is it that my paste-eating, mimeograph ink-sniffing generation is even still alive to tell these tales??
Oh my goodness do these posts bring back memories! There were 8 kids in my family and we were constantly making crafty messes and hideous Christmas ornaments! I also remember dripping crayon wax onto empty bottles to make candle holders. I think I liked playing with fire – thankfully no disasters ensued 🙂
I made pomander balls at Christmas and I still love the smell of clove and citrus.
As a kid of 8 or 9 years I baked cookies often. My mother didn’t bake and said store bought cookies were too expensive. (In her defense she did buy yarn and needles, hooks, and fabric, patterns, and thread anytime I wanted to knit, crichet or sew.)
At Christmas I made and decorated sugar cookies and gingerbread using very old cookie cutters, so old nobody remembered where they came from. I used a needle to pierce the baked cookies with doubled red thread which I tied into a hanging loop. The cookies were then arranged on a cookie tree made of wooden dowels painted avocado green.
It was oddly satisfying to eat those stale cookies every December and well into January.
Thank you for the fun question, I’m enjoying everyone’s comments.
Potholders! As a child I had one of those looms and dearly enjoyed making sure everyone had plenty of potholders. Fun!
the weirdest craft I remember was making 3-d images with wrapping paper and silicone seal
It would probably be either papier-mâché something, or plaster-of-paris “figurine” making, then painting. Both über-messy!
I forgot my mother and I made the ornament kits with pins, beads, lace and Styrofoam balls. Also candles in waxed milk cartons filled with cracked ice that made Swiss cheese like holes in the candles.
We used to make wreaths from paint and styrofoam.
I’m old enough to remember when Wheel of Fortune wasn’t a cash prize game. There were showrooms that winners of a round would need to “shop” in until they spent all that round’s “cash”.
My sister and I were obsessed with these showrooms. We made our own by using a lazy susan and cardboard and then elaborate collages of fabulous prizes around a theme.
Themes I can remember included Lisa Frank stuff, wicker everything, canopy beds and other little girl of the late 70’s ideal bedroom. They were amazing.
I remember that my sister and I received these pencil color-by-number kits by Venus Paradise; I remember being so excited, the smell of the freshly sharpened pencils, and negotiating over who would color in the portrait of Abraham Lincoln, and who would get to do Madame Curie. Hours of peaceful fun, that evolved later into an interest in needlepoint, cross stitch, and knitting pictures using intarsia.
Crocheting with Grandma. Other Grandma did tatting, but wouldn’t teach me because I would have made her lose her mind.
I made potholders from those loops but never understood why they were called potholders- they were too small and let the heat through.
Shrinky-Dink kits… Here, take these completely toxic plastic pieces, put them in a metal frame, and melt them in your home oven to make stained “glass”. What could be bad about that?!? Also, I remember ironing fall leaves between ?wax paper? to preserve them and using those for table decorations. It’s a wonder any of us survived childhood pre-80s!.
I liked to make the potholders on the loom. I didn’t turn into a crafter until my teens when I learned to knit and make beaded jewelry (late 60s and early 70s).
I loved hanging out with my dad at his workbench when my brothers weren’t around. My dad always said that I could do anything my brothers could while also encouraging me to be creative, so I would take any scraps of wood, sawdust, metal, cords, etc. and build little towns and creatures.
I liked making dioramas with crayfish exoskeletons and found objects. I also enjoyed macrame.
I loved to embroider prestamped pillowcases!
I used to fold up tissue paper flowers, but out of Kleenex, because we didn’t have fancy crafting supplies around our house!
In my Camp Fire Girls group we made origami Holiday ornaments out of fancy wrapping paper, fun times and wonderful memories.
Stamp making
Does making snow angels in the snow count? I don’t remember a lot of crafting, even though my mother knit, crocheted, sculpted, painted, and did ceramics. I loved making paper chains and cutting out the paper dolls and their outfits in McCalls. I’m sure my mother purchased the magazine just for me to do this. I think, though, my favorite was making animals using rubber molds and then painting these. I still have my dog figurine! I don’t see these around anymore, although I did this with my kids about 35 years ago. As for lovely or unlovely smells, my mother was an early believer in tv dinners!
I think crafts was a way for the adults in our life to keep us all entertained. My grandma would make sugar cookies, letting us stamp before baking and decorate with frosting and sprinkles after. We had Childcraft books from which we picked something to do whenever we ran out of ideas in the summer. My mom would make homemade play dough (flour, salt and water I think) that she would bake in the oven for us. I think the one I found most magical and would love to figure out how to recreate was a nanny who would let us shave crayons onto waxed paper and then would iron it, melting the crayon wax. All those colors and it looked like cheap stained glass! I think our nanny tired of ironing before I tired of shaving those crayons – I loved all the colors and the magic of them melting into each other.
My mom had a sewing room, and I would cut up bits of fabric and make little pillows shaped like animals. I remember a zebra, with zebra striped fabric.
I was a constant crafter as a kid. My favorite Christmas craft was making ornaments with my mom. The earliest one I remember was sticking toothpicks in little Styrofoam balls, coating it in glue, then putting it in a paper bag full of fake snow and glitter and shaking vigorously. They were so fun to make! I still have one on my tree. As we got older we progressed to cutting circles out of old cards and stapling them together to be spheres. Older still and we painted clothes pins to be people and dressed them in little felt outfits. I’m looking forward to next year when my grandson will be old enough to make ornaments with me.
The first craft I remember making is baby doll beds out of empty round oatmeal or salt containers. My Mom would send away for scrap ends of binding and lace, my Nana making contributions also. We would sit at the table and cut out the center, use that piece to make rockers for the bottom (I distinctly remember my Dad starting the cuts and me finishing with my baby scissors), and decorate the heck out of those little beds. Next came little quilts for the beds with cotton balls for pillows. Such fun.
I remember making potholders on a loom. Gum wrapper chains were also a fun activity. I liked the paint-by-number kits but never excelled at that.
Making and painting Christmas ornaments made out of dough. And in the summer, picking blackberries in the field next door and making jam. Yum!
Origami. A man visited our family from Japan and brought me a book of origami with paper and taught me How to make the crane.
As I was growing up, we had a beach cabin (where I now live) and we made plethorias of home polished rock doorstops, macrame wall hangings and plant hangers, driftwood sculptures and other items from found items. Our best one was on 4th of July for the US 1976 bicentennial. We had about 50 or so people here of all ages to celebrate and we made a huge sculpture in the yard from things people found on the beach. By the time it was finished, we had to shine car headlights on it for everyone to see it. A good time was had by all.
“plethoras”
Absolutely LOVE the felted creatures giveaway! Trying to remember WAY back to my favorite crafts: I think it might have been collecting fragrant rose petals all summer and then making them into rose-scented beads for a necklace I fashioned for my mother, the rose grower. They turned out black and lumpy but boy, did they smell great! I do believe my mother appreciated my efforts as she wore it often, and in public. She was a good mom.
my favorite craft was making miles and miles of ICord (though I didn’t know it was called that at the time) using a very fancy device my dad made for me that was modeled after a spinning wheel.
My favorite craft as a child was crocheting an afghan. My neighbor, Granny, taught me how to get started and sent me on my way. A week later, I visited her to check my progress where she said it was no good, and proceeded to rip it all out. My heart was on the floor! She kept the yarn and told me to come back the next day, which I did. She had crocheted it all back, plus some. Once again, she sent me away to continue. I finally got into the groove, but the farther I crocheted, the wider the blanket got. I kept that blanket for years. Great memories of the start of my love for needlework.
Beads made out of rolled-up magazine or newspaper triangle strips. I haven’t read everything, but I haven’t seen this one. And sculptures made from telephone wire, which is now a thing for crafts from Africa, but where did we get the wire?
Using gimp to make lanyards and such was always a favorite. I learned at the local park. I loved it so much I became one of those park instructors as soon as I was old enough!
It’s lame, but I made a bajillion of those loopy woven potholder thingys.
I adored rug hooking kits when I was a kid…I don’t even know of you can still get them?!?
I used to make latch hook rugs from kits – I have a round Santa, maybe 3 ft diameter, that I made back in high school. Every year at this time it comes out and hangs on my living room wall for a few weeks.
String art!
My sister and I liked to hand sew clothes for our troll dolls. One summer at my grandmother’s, we were sewing on a Sunday afternoon and she made us stop because we were “working” on the sabbath. What we considered play, she thought was work!
I don’t know if it counts as a craft, but my favorite creation activity as a kid was Lite Brite! All those little clear pegs and the black paper that covered the screen.
A friend and I made clothespin people. We would draw a face on the head of the clothespin and make dresses, skirts and kerchiefs for them from fabric scraps.
Gum wrapper chains were the coolest!!!! And the best gum wrapper was Fruit Stripe. So many cool colors! Thanks for the memory!
Making paper dolls & then creating outfits for them. McCall’s magazine used to have dolls & clothes you could punch or cut out, I remember how sad I was when they stopped doing it. After that devastation, I had to create my own dolls & clothing.
We made paper people from cardboard from shirts and for clothes we cut out outfits from magazines. Sometimes we made our own outfits from wrapping paper
Making door stops with my grandmother from Sears catalogs.
Childhood crafts bring back so many special and wonderful memories. Pencil/pen holders made out of cans with either popsicle sticks or wooden clothespin halves glued on them and then decorated. Styrofoam balls with decorative ribbon, beads, sequins pinned into them for Christmas ornaments.
I’d forgotten all about potato carving! Also macaroni art, loomed potholders, etc.
I remember spool knitting, kind of like I-cord knitting only using a spool with 4 nails around the center hole.LOL! Hours of fun to make potholders! Life skills learned in Girl Scouts.
Spool knitting
The little wooden mushroom looking thing that made yards and yards of knit I cord. I made coasters, critters and I don’t remember all what else. Got me addicted to having fiber in my hands!
I did a lot of hand sewing after one of my grandmothers taught me to sew. I made ill-fitting Barbie doll clothes.
I don’t remember doing a lot of crafts as a kid, but I did make embriodery floss friendship bracelets.
I remember wrapping strips of fabric (from the leftovers at the Munsingwear factory) around wire hangers with my grandma. Nothing ever went to waste! Grandma would go and pick up bags of the remnants for free. Crazy. Probably the beginning of my infatuation for anything craft worthy!
Every December, when I was in Elementary school, my mom and I would make crafty ornaments together to give out as gifts. She continued this tradition with my younger sister into the early 80s. Each year was a different ornament, so all together, there’s quite a collection of 70s craftiness! They all still hang on my mom’s tree every year and for me, serve as little place holders in my mind. Clothespin soldiers, angels cut and sewn from a tacky fabric panel, felt ice skates with a paper clip for the blade. It’s the creation of these that I remember fondly, not the toys and gifts.
I liked making garlands with popcorn—the best part may have been eating the broken pieces!
Coloring books. Endless hours with my two sisters “Let’s color!”
My favourite craft from childhood was making those long yarn cords with a knitting nancy. I would sit in the basement for hours, and love to watch the chord emerge. Fantastic fun. I never did anything with the cord, which tells me that even then, I was a process knitter, and not necessarily so needing to see a wonderful or functional garment at the end. Ha, learned something today.
As a girl in Girl Scouts, we learned basket weaving. My dad became the best expert at it. I still have a couple of the baskets he made… but none of my own. It was great fun. And as an adult, living next to – and volunteering at – a state historic park with a lovely little Indian museum representing all the local tribes, I have learned how to make pine needle baskets. Only trouble is, I spend too much time knitting to perfect my basket-weaving skills. ButI would love to learn how to make needle felted critters!
I don’t think my comments posted below, so I’ll try again. I love learning basket weaving in Girl Scouts. That’s when I learned knitting, too. I was able to continue learning knitting and crochet on my own, but the basket weaving was definitely a group project. Great fun.
I loved to make simple things with my mother’s straight-stitch Singer sewing machine: doll clothes, drawstring bags, and pajamas. Those are uplifting memories.
Besides learning to knit and doing spool knitting, I enjoyed making baskets out of pine needles and plastic cord. Some of them were actually functional!