Creative Crafting with Baker Ross

Ad disclosure: We were sent a box of craft products for the purpose of this post. However, as per my PR info page, this review reflects my unbiased & honest opinion of the product.

We have recently joined the Baker Ross Bloggers Network (woohoo!) and this week saw our first delivery of Baker Ross goodies to get crafty with. Baker Ross are a craft supplies company that specialise in arts and crafts materials aimed at children. They have everything from basic craft kits that just involve sticking bits together to create something, to candle making kits and beginner sewing kits.

The first things I let Georgie get her hands on were the giant green washable paint pad, the dinosaur stampers, and the gift bags. Georgie wanted to make a dinosaur bag for Lydia – both she and her little sister are obsessed with gift bags at the moment and will spend ages making each other presents of their toys in bags, and giving them to one another with great ceremony and quite often a bit of singing.

Lydia is a dino-fan, so Georgie was very pleased with her blue dino-bag. We soon moved onto stamping dinosaurs onto paper and also doing some finger painting and hand prints to make pictures. I added some detail to the dinos with a black biro, under the direction of my ever-so-slightly bossy eldest girl. 

Once we were finished making a nice green mess (there is nothing quite like the realisation that you forgot to get your child to put on their apron to make you kick yourself), we moved onto playing with the fluorescent soft dough and alphabet cutters. This was an instant success as Georgie loves playing with dough, and is really into learning her letters at the moment.

We started off by making Georgie’s name out of the different coloured doughs, then moved onto every family member – and I am afraid to report Georgie asked to make the dog’s name before her daddy’s! I helped Georgie to flatten the dough, and then told her what letters we needed for each word, and she would hunt for the right cutter and cut out the letter. We used pieces of paper to put the letters onto which made it easy to rearrange letters and move our words around.

We played with these for ages and it was a great way to practise letter identification, and spelling out the phonic sounds of each letter too. It is always great to find fun ways to work on reading skills, and I am sure we will be getting out the dough & alphabet cutters a lot over the summer holidays. The dough comes in a sturdy plastic tub that has a really good air-tight seal, so the dough is going to stay usable for ages.

We saved our final craft project for Lydia to join in with after her nap, and both girls really enjoyed decorating these foam snap-on bracelets with the rainbow foam stickers. Both Georgie and Lydia made a bracelet for themselves, and one for their best friend Sophie (who clearly gets the best deal, with two bracelets to herself).

It was great to have an activity that Georgie and Lydia could do together, mess free. Peeling the backing off the stickers and arranging them on the bracelets is great for hand eye co-ordination. It was a chance for the girls to work together too, as Georgie was helping Lydia out when she wanted a certain type of sticker, or if she ripped her backing paper.

The girls both really enjoyed their first Baker Ross delivery, and it was lovely having a chilled out afternoon of crafting fun with them. We still have loads of life in the paint pad, the dino stampers have cleaned up nicely ready for their next use, and we have half the wristbands and stickers left too. The dough and cutters will last indefinitely, so I can see we have a lot more crafting to do with this lot in our future.