Beyond the Wakefields

I am not a crafty person. I took up scrapbooking one summer but gave up because the pages I created never looked anywhere near as good as the magazines. One of the women who works in our children’s room is amazing with crafts. She can come up with a craft on any theme for any age group and have them all be different. I am the complete opposite. But last year when I went to visit the schools to promote the summer reading program,a girl entering the 6th grade asked, “Are you going to do any crafts?” with a look on her face I couldn’t ignore. She had grown up going to the library and just because she was joining the YA program didn’t mean she wanted to give up doing crafts. And even though I’m totally inept at crafts, I told her I would.

This summer we did crafts on three different days. The first day was duct tape crafts. This in some ways continues the craft I did last year as I bought way too much duct tape and we’ll probably be doing these crafts for years. Last summer we made wallets and roses. The day before Valetine’s Day we also made roses in the YA room and that was quite a draw. This year we stuck to the summer theme. We made beach bags, water bottle holders or visors. We used patterns from Pack-O-Fun Magazine.

The second day of crafts was beading. We used pony beads to make penguins and Kenny from South Park. This was very popular and the teens really enjoyed themselves. The patterns for these and many other beading projects can be founds at Making Friends.

The third craft day was Lava Lamps and monkeys. The lava lamps were created out of empty soda bottles, water, cooking oil, and powdered tempera paint. I got the instructions off one of the YALSA listservs. Several librarians have described these as very popular, but I thought they looked rather disappointing. My two teens loved making them though and made about three apiece (We had extra supplies due to the low turnout). The monkeys were made from pipe cleaners and pom poms also from Pack-O-Fun Magazine.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 10th, 2007 at 5:00 pm and is filed under summer reading, programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.