The 8 Best Craft Kits for Creative Kids

Best Overall: Crayola 140pc Inspiration Art Set with Case

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For kids, quick arts and crafts are all about thinking creatively and exploring color and texture, all while fine-tuning motor skills. As proud as children are of their final product, young ones will also enjoy the process of creating art: the feel of fuzzy or prickly chenille stems between their fingers, the snip when they cut through different materials and the pleasure dipping their hands into a tub of colorful pompoms, sequins or beads to pick the just-right one for the current project. For maximum creativity, look for a kit with a variety of kid-friendly materials and no rules, like this kit one, which includes everything from beads to felt to chenille stems and kid-safe scissors. This kit makes a great gift for a young one who’s ready to flex her creative muscles!

Best Craft Subscription : Kiwico Subscription Box

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If your child can’t get enough of crafting, a subscription to KiwiCo is the best choice for you. You pick the age group—it has boxes for babies right on up to teenagers—and interest (“atlas” for geography buffs, “doodle” for creative-types, “tinker” for builders, or “eurokea” for future engineers) then wait for your child’s monthly box to arrive. It will include everything they need to make their craft, examples include: making their own kite in a “fun with flight” box, DIY soap, a tutorial on slime, and more. Choose from a one-time box or three, six, or 12-month subscription.

Best Paint Set: Color Crayz Kids Art Set

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If your little Picasso or Frieda Kahlo ready to graduate from washable paints to the real thing, this affordable kit has everything they’ll need to artistically express themselves, including 12 vibrant non-toxic acrylic vibrant paint colors, a mixing tray palette, five paintbrushes of varying sizes, six 8 x 10 100 percent cotton art canvases, a waterproof smock with three front pockets, and a miniature easel all packaged in a portable, zip-top storage bag. Challenge your child to paint portraits, landscapes still lives, or whatever it is that inspires them. Painting is shown to boost their self-confidence and social skills, too.

Best Paper Art: Gamenote Colorful Kids Origami Kit

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Traditional origami may look like a complicated art, but this kit breaks it down into easy to follow steps. The process starts with its colorful double-sided paper that’s marked with features of the animal or object your child is creating (a butterfly’s wings, a puppy’s nose) that make it easy for them to see what they’re making—and that they’re following the instructions, which are illustrated in the accompanying book, correctly. The kit comes with 108 high-quality, eco-friendly papers that have 54 patterns (two pieces of paper for each) plus ten practice papers.

Best Knitting: Cra-Z-Art® Shimmer 'n Sparkle™ Cra-Z-Knitz™ Ultimate Designer Knitting Station

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There’s nothing more stylish than wearing your own custom-created hats, scarves, leg warmers, and more—and nothing more fun for your little fashionista than DIYing them. This kit, perfect for beginning knitters, comes with a round loom and a square loom, a hook and a needle (both kid-friendly and plastic), four different types of yarn (150 yards of acrylic and 15 yards each of specialty, glitter metallic and eyelash yarn), and a desk that neatly holds all the supplies. They’ll have just as much fun learning to knit and purl as they will wearing all their new accessories. Maybe you’ll even get a scarf out of it!

Best Food Kit: Real Cooking Chocolate Pen

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Encourage their inner Willy Wonka with this easy-to-use Chocolate Pen. As the name suggests, it’s a pen that writes in chocolate. Kids can doodle freeform or create cute chocolate confections with one of the 40 molds of things like butterflies, owls, or cherries (trays are included).

It comes with a melting tray that plugs into a USB port and four packs of chocolate. When you need refills, pick up any type of melting chocolate. (Adult supervision is recommended for the melting process depending on the age of your child.) The candies harden in minutes so they can enjoy their tasty treats almost immediately. The auto-fill pen runs on two AA batteries.

Best Sticker Kit: StickTogether USA Map

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Part sticker craft, part paint by numbers, StickTogether kits come with a coded poster and sticker sheets that tell your child which color goes with which letter on the poster. Though it looks tricky, children as young as five can do it—picking up the stickers and placing them down is a good workout for their fine motor skills. It will take a group of three to five kids about two hours to finish one; adults are encouraged to get involved too.

Worried about sticky fingers? Each kit includes 5 percent more stickers than you’ll need to finish, just in case. We like the USA map since it offers opportunities to learn geography and history, but they offer a range of fun options including a unicorn and 100th day of school countdown.