Green Product Review: Artterro Arts & Crafts Kits

Review summary: Great, low-priced art kits for kids made with eco-friendly materials.

Kids and the new art kits

Product: Three art kits from Artterro – Collage Jewelry Kit, Creativity Kit and Paint With Wool Portrait Kit.

Use: Crafty fun for creative kids – and even adults.

Cost: Vary. Each kit costs about $16-$25, but I think all are reasonable. The three we tried are specifically:

Katana and art kits

Eco-perks:

For more information on the eco-perks of these art kits, please read my Artterro company review, which discusses materials, eco-benefits and other stuff about the company. With only very minor cons, I gave this company 5 out of 5 trees, a perfect score.

My reviewers: Cedar (age nine), Katana (age 12), Jade (age 14) and myself.

Collage Jewelry Kit

What we thought of the Collage Jewelry Kit:

Katana spent the most time with the Collage Jewelry Kit and had a great time with it. Cedar showed interest in this kit too, but said he needs to think up a good project to do with it. This kit is one of the newest from Arterro and comes packed with lovely fancy decoupage papers plus wooden jewelry elements such as a bangle, beads and pendants. Rounding out the set is twine, glaze, brush, findings and ideas sheet.

The kit says you can design 6 unique jewelry pieces, but I’m betting your kids might be able to make more. Cedar combined elements of this kit with the creativity kit and also we have beads and hemp laying around that the kids wanted to mix and match with as well. Even as a stand-alone kit though, this is a lot of fun.

Katana figured out on her own how to use the decoupage papers and glaze quickly to make many cool pieces and with just a little help, Cedar thought the process made sense too.

Creativity Kit

What we thought of the Creativity Kit:

We liked the Creativity Kit, although it was likely our least favorite of the three. Still fun though, just more like the art stuff we already have around the house. Cedar loved the idea sheet though, which offered up some ideas that were new to him.

The Creativity Kit comes with lots of items to allow for total creativity. There are beads, wool felt shapes, beautiful handmade papers, needles and thread. Kids could really make just about anything with this kit, but suggested projects are greeting cards, bookmarks, ornaments, gift tags, small sculptures and more. There’s enough materials for about eight projects. Like the Collage Jewelry kit above though, the kids ended up combining this kit with the other kits and stuff from around the house.

Paint with Wool kit

What we thought of the Paint With Wool Portrait Kit:

I think everyone in the house (adults included) tried and loved the Paint With Wool Portrait Kit, which is basically simple wool needle felting, but it was brand new to us. Jade, the oldest kid tester and I had a bit of a time figuring out how to do this, but once we got going we showed everyone else and even the youngest kid (Cedar) got good at it.

The kit comes with enough materials to make four 4-inch pieces of art. To use this kit, you poke colorful roving wool bits into the base shape with a felting needle. The wool can be used to paint pictures of just about anything. No glue or sewing required.

Our biggest complaint about this kit was the smaller squares of felt. We felt like we could have made cooler bigger creations. Also, we didn’t like the felt square colors too much (colors vary per kit). For example all three kids wanted to use the red square. Actually the kids ended up taking wool from the Creativity kit to use with this one. If you’ve got more than one child, I’d pick up more than one of these kits.

On the plus side, the fun factor was huge with this kit. Because it was a project none of us had done, we all had a great time learning it and the kids were delighted to see images they poked with wool appear. I’d say this kit was the biggest hit of all the kits and likely we’ll look further into more advanced felting projects.

On the safety side, all of us accidentally poked our fingers at least once with the needle, so be careful!

See the gallery below for some of the kids’ crafty creations, along with some other, close up kit images:

Overall score:

4.5 trees

4.5 out of 5 little trees. It’s hard to hand over a score for three different art kits. The wool art kit was so much fun that had the wool pieces been a little larger, it would have gotten a 5. The Jewlery kit would have also got a 5 all alone, because Katana had a lot of fun with it.

The Creativity kit wasn’t as unique, in our opinion, but then we have a ton of art supplies at home. We’d give it a 4 because most of this stuff in the creativity kit we’d seen before. Rounded out, all three together, we decided on an almost perfect score of 4.5.

We’d highly suggest the Paint With Wool Portrait Kit and Collage Jewelry Kit. We’d suggest the Creativity Kit for a child who is new to art projects or who doesn’t have many art supplies. Overall, these kits were a hit, an excellent price and the kids are interested in trying out some of the other available kits as well.

Available Kits: