1-2-3! Textured Products Review

Is it just me or has this spring been wetter than most. It feels like everyday, we get a little bit of time outside, but not enough. We always seem to be racing against the weather to get our fun in.

With all of this rain, we have been doing our best to keep busy inside. We have been building forts, coloring, playing with some craft kits we have and more. The PlayDoh has been out more times in the past couple of weeks than it has been in the past couple of months.

Sometimes, you just need something new to do. Fortunately for me, I had received a sample from 1-2-3! Textured Products to review that was a perfect activity to fill time, entertain and allow the kids to explore. I got a butterfly kit, but there are a number of themes of craft kits available. So, yesterday, when my daughter was looking for something to do, I pulled it out.

The Butterfly Kit came with a die cut butterfly (in purple, one of her favorite colors), some foil squares, torn shapes of foil, and small assorted shapes of a colored, textured cellophane-type material. My daughter went and grabbed a glue stick.
We decided before we started where we wanted to put each type of material. We decided that we would use the cellophane for the main body of the butterfly, the small foil squares for the antennae and upper wings and the assorted foil shapes for the lower wings. In an effort to acheive this, we worked one section at a time. With the cellophane section, we made a small pile and tried to place them on the glue to ensure that they stuck and that we covered the glue. It sounded good in theory, but we both wound up with glue on our fingers and sticking to everything. For the next two shapes, we went with more of a sprinkle approach. It seemed to work pretty well. When we shook off the excess, I was really glad that we had set up our workstation with some paper underneath that we could easily pick up and funnel the pieces back into a usable pile.

As soon as we finished with the butterfly, and seeing the amount of decorating materials that we had left, my daughter went in search of something else that she could decorate. She found a picture of a fish, which was cut out and partially colored. She decided that we would decorate all but the fin that was colored and the tail that she was going to finish coloring. By this point, all of our decorations were mixed, so she wound up with a very pretty, mixed style fish. I actually think I like the way it turned out better than if we had had the decorations still separated and could have striped the fish with shapes.

I think it could be nice to keep a few of these on hand. They have kits that come with three activities that are available on their website for about $4.99 each. They also have a monthly subscription service, that provides an activity for each day for any number of children. The cost for the monthly kit is $12 / child, plus flat rate shipping. I think that this might work well for a daycare or for a preschool.

You can find their product selection and ordering information on their website. You can also follow them on Twitter.

No compensation was received for this post. The craft kit was provided for free from 1-2-3! Textured Products through MamaBzz. All opinions expressed are my own.