Review Detail

The Kids' Book of Craft Love: Write. Make. Play. Share.

Kids Nonfiction 263

A book to take apart... and put back together!

January 14, 2025 (Updated: June 19, 2026)

Overall rating

4.7

Writing Style

4.0

Illustrations/Photos (if applicable)

5.0

Learning Value

5.0

I didn't make any of the crafts, but I did read all of the directions.

Book lovers who feel bad even highlighting passages or annotating text: this book is supposed to be torn apart, and the pages turned into projects! If you are familiar with Flow magazine (which originated in the Netherlands), you will know the format of this book and understand this. As someone who even had trouble using stickers on a calendar as a child, this would have made me a little anxious, even as I desperately wanted to do every single project, in order, until the book was completed!

Divided into four chapters, Write, Make, Play, and Share, this book offers a wide range of projects for children who have a fair amount of manual dexterity. Write has journals, cards, and directions for a zine, and even has a nice calendar to cut out and assemble. Make has an adorable forest to assemble, a box, mandala stickers, embroidered postcards, and some origami instructions. Play has a small booklet in the shape of a bear, with different animals that all need outfits. This alone would have kept me occupied for hours! There are also bracelets, puzzle cubes, and a kaleidescope with some mirrored paper. Share includes notes, banners, place cards, flowers, some folded gift boxes, and even more stickers.

Good Points

While the age range given by the publisher is 5-9, I would not have given this to my own children until about third or fourth grade, when their scissor skills were good enough to cut some of the smaller pieces neatly. While the scope of the projects would be appreciated by younger readers, I plan to give this book to a 7th grader who likes to do origami and create personalized greeting cards, and I think she will be very happy with the array of projects. While I didn't open all of the envelopes (which are firmly glued down), one review mentioned a needle for sewing cards. It's quite a nice yarn needle with a large eye, but children younger than third grade might benefit from supervision when using it.

The directions are at the beginning of the chapter, because the pages with the materials need to be removed. There are not a lot of instructions, and this is another reason why this might be better used by an older child who has some previous experience with paper crafts. I've worked with a lot of middle schoolers, and very few of them can even thread sewing needles, so younger children might need more assistance with the projects, which would make a nice activity for them to do with an older sibling or with an adult.

I've not seen anything quite like this; the paper is lovely, and there are a lot of the much coveted stickers that always seemed "too good" to use when I was young. This would make an exquisite gift for a crafty young person, and requires only basic additional supplies like colored pencils, scissors, tape, and glue.