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Since this year’s Summer Reading Collaborative is Express Yourself at Your Library I thought it would be appropriate to post my latest craft experiments. After watching this Martha Stewart video my girlfriends and I decided  to make these cute glove dolls! 

 (I made this one!)

 (For more reference on making cute dolls or just cute stuff please check out the following posts:
Crafty Stuff, The Cute Book)

I also made these lucky kitties from Creative Park at Canon. This would be a great craft for teens, because it’s a little challenging but the instructions are easy to follow. (I started off using regular card stock, but found the suggested matte photo paper (about $16 dollars for 100 from Walmart)makes the colors more vibrant.  Also you could use the paper sculptures as displays in your library.

If you subscribe to YALSA’s ya-yaac listserv for teen programming, my thoughts about The Hipster Librarian’s Guide to Teen Craft Projects by Tina Coleman and Peggy Llanes pretty much echo what others said about it. This book would be most useful for librarians new to teen craft programming and who are looking for ideas or justification to support craft programs. For those who have been doing craft programs for a while now and are looking for new ideas, you’ll get more bang for your buck with non-library specific books like Kathy Cano-Murillo’s Crafty Diva books or Mark Montano’s The Big-Ass Book of Crafts, not to mention free websites and blogs. (Although, of course, with the websites and blogs, the cost is in the time you’ll spend searching.)

After a brief introduction advocating the benefits of crafts for teens, Coleman and Llanes give instructions for 12 different craft projects, which is not much considering the book’s $40 price tag. While I think it would have made more sense to have put the information in the appendix (a supplies and tool list and project materials list) and glossary (techniques, tools and materials) at the start of the book, the organization of the actual projects make sense, moving from simplest to most difficult. The crafts included run from the typical-and-can-easily-find-instructions-for-them-elsewhere (marble magnets, t-shirt reconstruction) to the would-not-be-able-to-pull-that-off-in-my-library (one requires sewing machines, another may take up to *four* hours). Each project begins with a description and ideas on how you can tie in the craft to other programs, and lists the difficulty, time, supervision, group size and mess factor involved. Materials are separated into two sections, supplies and tools, and materials specific to the craft. Then the authors detail the prep work that needs to be done prior to the program, and finally give the instructions for the craft. Spinoffs of the craft are also suggested for most of the projects; however, no instructions on how to adapt it are given. To be sure, some of the spinoffs don’t require instructions, but how exactly do you turn the woven paper basket into a picture frame?

Just as disappointing is the design and presentation of the book, which is printed entirely in black and white with a dull layout. Perhaps economies of scale made color printing prohibitive, but every craft book I’ve seen recently is in full color, or at least includes color inserts showing the final product, at a lower price. I have to admit that it’s difficult for me to separate my reaction to the content of the book from my reaction to the production/design. Overall, though, I found The Hipster Librarian’s Guide to Teen Craft Projects a lackluster book at best.

I didn’t see any simple projects you could do with a group here, but if you knit, you can make your own Coraline sweater (PDF).

Look what I made!

Since I haven’t blogged much about crafts recently, here’s the teen craft we did on Wednesday, a National Library Week special. As usual, the teens’ journals were more creative than mine, but I still like the one I made. I think I’ll use it as a reading journal, someplace to take notes as I read and for books I don’t blog about.

And some of the pages inside:

This is an easy, fun, and creative craft for teens. I only had to buy the chipboard for the covers and one pad of 12” x 12” scrapbooking cardstock expressly for this program, so it wasn’t too expensive, either. However, it does require some special equipment, namely a Zutter Bind-it-All machine to punch holes through the chipboard covers and paper we put inside, and to put everything together. If you know someone who scrapbooks, see if they have one you can borrow. My library’s children’s librarian borrowed the machine we used from a friend, and the wire for the binding was leftover from an adult program. I had additional scrapbooking paper leftover paper from previous programs; gluesticks, paper trimmers, and other supplies on hand; as well as die cuts (which someone donated to the library) and punches, which the teens always enjoy using to add decoration.

The price of this program will vary depending on what, and how much, you need to purchase. If you’re looking for a just plain cheap teen craft program, there’s always shrink art, which we did on Monday, again, but with an entirely different set of teens than last year’s NLW, all of whom (guys and girls) enjoyed it. Or try the marbled paper—Coolest. Craft. EVER.—or make your own sticker ideas. But I am definitely doing this journal program again, probably during Teen Read Week or a future National Library Week. Next time, though, I’ll get a teen volunteer to punch holes in the cardstock before the program.

Additional thoughts about this program:

• Buy 8½” x 11” chipboard. It’s a lot easier to cut a couple of sheets of 12” x 12” scrapbooking paper to fit the chipboard than to cut your interior pages to the dimensions of the chipboard.
• Use cardstock or heavy weight paper instead of regular 20 lb. paper for the interior pages so teens can also decorate the inside of their journal. Plus, I think it makes the journal seem a little more special.
• I’ve had teen guys at other papercraft programs, but none came to this one, other than the guy who was just there watching two female friends. In any case, there are a few scrapbook paper sets, like this one, that will appeal to teen guys and girls.
• Try it as a two-day program. One day for making the journals, the other day for a journaling/writing program.

So what else did folks do with teens for National Library Week?

My husband and I had to drive to Ohio for a funeral a few weeks ago and so I naturally checked out a stack of audiobooks to give us something to listen to (not that an iPod wouldn’t have been just as entertaining).  Now I try to pick a range of books that I think we both would be happy listening to.  Jon tends to like military and non-fiction which I am not always a fan of.  But we both like science fiction, humor, and certain types of non-fiction.  So with that in mind, I picked out 6 or 7 books.  We listened to some funny David Sedaris, but that only lasted an hour and a half.  So Jon thought something by Heinlein would be good.  Now I admit that I have only ever read Puppet Masters but I loved it so I figured I would like this one.  NOTE:The chance of a person liking or disliking an audiobook is largely dependant on the person reading it.  The back of the CD did not even tell us who did the reading.  Not a good sign.

But I digress.  The book is about young Thorby who starts off as a slave and slowly makes his way from slave to free man to trader to military soldier to being very very rich all by the time he is 20.  But it all happens in such an uninteresting way that you do not feel there is any plot.  Yet you can’t help but continue because you want to find out if Thorby, who at the beginning of the book has an unknown identity, ever discovers who he is.  So Jon and I listened to it.  Unfortunately, the discs were longer than the drive and so we arrived back home with 1.5 hours still left to listen to.  And we finally did that by taking a drive tonight.  I have to say that I don’t really know why we listened to the rest.  It was singularly uninteresting and yet there was something there (definitely NOT the narrators nasally annoying voice) that made us trudge onward.  But I am happy to say it is done.  We’ve already agreed that next time we go on a car trip, it’s David Sedaris straight through.