Think Crafts Blog – Craft Ideas and Projects – CreateForLess

Guest Blogger, Gillian, from the Blog “Dried Figs and Wooden Spools”.

Ahhh, Plastic. Where would our children’s art projects be without it? Remember that commercial from a few years ago, Plastic makes it Possible? Well, plastic does indeed make it possible. It doesn’t matter how many hand made, toxin free, eco friendly wooden toys I buy my kids; they like plastic. They like shrinky dinks (which I admit are totally fun but also a little scary) they like foam stickers, they like the cheap plastic balls at the toy store, we’re even reading a book in which one of the characters is named Plastic, and they love it.

And to be honest, so do I. My son has spent at least two hours a day for the past week obsessivly making various things out of Perler Beads. Remember those? I think they’ve been around since the times of the Dinosaurs. I certainly remember spending hours of my childhood carefully designing cats and dogs and soccer balls out of them for my mother to iron together. And now I may have to buy stock in them. If they can keep him this busy all summer, they are worth their weight in gold, which admittedly, wouldn’t be that much since they are about as light as a bag of feathers, but you get my point.

So far Briton has created balls and stars and a dinosaur or three, several suns and some kind of psychedelic shapes that have no name. All of his teachers got something the last day of school. The neighbor girl now has her very own Perler Briton. My husband has at least four on his desk at work and I have a kaleidoscope of plastic thingys artfully arranged on my dresser between my Tiffany pearls and my Grandmothers jewelry box. All hail king plastic.

Does your child love plastic they way mine does? What kinds of cool thing have they made from Perler beads? And do you secretly love to watch them melt together the way I do? Come on…spill!

Click here, to read more of Gillian’s blog posts.