A Crafty Afternoon with JacDo

A couple of months ago I saw a tweet from Mrs Crafty B (aka Annie) looking for crafters/bloggers with children who lived near Cardiff if they'd like to attend an event held by JacDo. I'd not heard of the company before so went to have a look at their website which caught my interest immediately.

JacDo is a company which created craft kits for kids, tailored towards the children's ages, linking in with the national curriculum (in Wales, where they are based) and comes in both English and Welsh, making the bilingual... something that is promoted heavily in Wales.

So I eagerly signed up and on Saturday off we set. The event was held at the Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff, which is worth going to for the tea and cookies alone (we weren't early enough to sample any of the meals, but they looked scrummy!)

There were 3 making stations, so of course, we had to try them all! First off, we made Sock Snowmen... these are just TOO cute!

The kids loved that they could do almost all of this by themselves and were very proud of their snowmen (Freddie and Snowy!)

Next up were paper plate wreaths - these were made by dipping a bath scrunchie into green paint and covering the plate and then using cotton wool balls, dipped into red paint for the berries:

And finally some sewing (which my two were delighted about cause it made them just like Mummy!) to make a Penguin and a Santa hand puppet:

Seren sneaking in a cake before her work was done!

Patrick sharing his cake with Santa!

Seren videoed me sewing!

I brought home two very happy children after their "crafternoon" and both are keen to get started on sewing up their treats from the goody bag they got to bring home. Although Patrick had to do some sweet talking to get persuade the ladies in charge that he should be allowed his own bag and not to have to share one with Seren (which actually I agree with - I don't think you should run an event like this, especially one for kids and not hand out a goody bag to everyone... if you are doing them, then it should be one per person)

So I guess the question now is will we subscribe to the JacDo monthly craft box?

There are 3 sizes of box - Petite, Medium and Large:

According to Bethan & Megan (the ladies who run JacDo) for two kids of a similar age, a large box would be ideal as there would be mixed activities, tailored to their ages for them to do together. While I do like the idea, £14.99 per month is quite a commitment but it's not a horrendous amount of money. I like the idea that they tie in with the national curriculum and I think for parents who aren't especially crafty themselves, its a great idea as you don't have to plan out the crafts, that's all done for you.

The answer is I don't know for definite, but I suspect we might give it a try!

One thing that has occurred to me, whilst writing this post is that it might have been more persuasive for the afternoon to be spend going through one of the boxes and doing the crafts inside the box... that way the parents would have got a better feel for exactly what they would be paying for. But of course that would only have been possible if the children attending were all the same age.

NB: This is not a sponsored post and I was not paid to promote JacDo, it is my honest opinion of the afternoon and the company.