Summer Arts & Crafts Ideas for under $8

Just in time for Summer vacation, I decided to do a little experiment and drive the kids over to the local Hobby Lobby to find some art supplies to try this Summer. The goal was to find some Summer arts & crafts that were under $8 a kid. I wasn’t sure if my experiment would work but I was willing to give it a shot. Here are my findings:

Hypothesis: Kids will be well behaved in craft store. They will search out a craft for under $8 each. This craft will be fun and entertaining.

Procedure: Drive over to the craft store and let them wander down the aisle until each child finds something that catches their eye…for under $8 each. They each will find 1 item that looks like fun.

Conclusion: Hobby Lobby is filled with a lot of fun crafts for kids! We were able to meet our goal of spending less than $8 per kid on fun crafts. See below for more details on what they made and how they turned out.

Royal & Langnickel Sketching Made Easy – $4.99

My 10 year old picked this out. This was a nice kit! It came with several graphite pencils ranging from 3H to 6B. This kit also includes a pencil sharpener and a nice eraser. It came with detailed instructions on how to shade in your artwork. It also includes a very lightly sketched drawing (outline sketch) of whatever picture is on the cover of the kit. The goal is to learn about value and shading through cross hatch, smudging, and a few other styles of shading. It taught him how to create depth in his artwork. This was fun for him to learn and it truly allowed him to create a nice looking piece of art.

Melissa & Doug Create a Craft Flower Mirror $5.99

The 8 year old found a mirror decorating kit. The kit contains a wooden mirror which is painted pink and purple. It also includes glitter glue, stickers and decorative sticky gems. She had tons of fun creating her mirror. It is listed as appropriate for ages 4+, and I could tell as it didn’t take her long to complete this craft. She did have a blast doing it and she insisted on buying this particular kit.

Crayola Color Alive Coloring Book $7.99

We also chose a Crayola Color Alive coloring book which works with a new iPad app by the same name. We chose that to share with our special needs kiddo and our preschooler.

This kit contains 7 crayons including a special “Fire Breath” crayon which unlocks “virtual effects”! The premise of this coloring book is that you can download their free app on your tablet, take a picture of your finished coloring page (through the app) and the creature on the page comes to life. You can then proceed to take a bunch of pictures with your scary creature. I have to admit, I thought this was gimmicky when I first saw what it was. I tend to value teaching art to our kids and not allowing technology to cloud that.

However, my son who has autism is not into creating anything. He doesn’t enjoy art. He doesn’t like crafts. He did enjoy this. I begged him to try it, but once he heard that the creature will come to life in the iPad, he was sold. He actually colored his picture all by himself and then enjoyed watching it move on the tablet. Our 4 year old also went crazy over this project. Surprisingly, it was a hit!