The qualities of a good Kids Craft website, and a review of Kiddley.com, a site worth parents' and children's attention.
Several Kids Crafts internet sites stand out by a couple of great qualities:
- Collectively they offer exciting and rewarding projects for a wide age range.
- They are very good at estimating the appropriate age for each project.
- They don’t require fancy equipment and only manageable amounts of time.
- Many offer blow-by-blow pictures of children making the crafts.
- They are down-to-earth, light-hearted and personal.
- They are often beautifully illustrated.
- Most “make a living” with ads, but those are clearly marked and run discreetly in the webpage’s background. Most content is commercially independent.
All these good qualities are due not in the least to the fact that most of these sites are maintained by moms and dads whose kids test each project.
We begin with the most famous among the Kids Crafts sites: Kiddley.com
Claire Robertson, the Australian mom who runs the site (along with her husband), posts entries almost daily. Though at the time of writing it is not even a year old, Kiddley already features 50 Arts & Crafts projects, 34 activities, 14 “Bright Ideas”, 14 food-related projects, several outdoors activities, gamesandbooks.
Kiddley also publishes contributions from readers and links to crafts on other sites. It also has a Flickr group where readers upload pictures taken by their children around a weekly theme.
Claire is a seemingly tireless mom of one 4-year-old daughter, AJ (named “Chief Guinea Pig”) and one infant daughter, LJ. She is an inventive, realistically inclined crafter of projects large and small. Her well-written, step-by-step instructions are illustrated with pictures of what you will need and of AJ’s little hands doing the actual crafting.
There is some personal information, but it is never inappropriate or uninteresting, and makes the site a joy to follow. (You can follow Claire’s personal life more closely on her blog, loobylu.com).
Claire is also a fantastic illustrator, and Kiddley.com is a pleasure to the eye.
There is discrete a column of ads, but none of Kiddley’s projects feature named products. In case you are curious about the children’s products Claire and her team find helpful, fun and rewarding, they have another site, Kiddley Links, which provides links to products of large manufacturers as well as individual crafters. Claire herself sells t-shirts and mugs on CafePress.com.
