Book Review & Giveaway: Find it, Make it

Regular readers will know I'm a big fan of Clare Youngs - I've reviewed her books Papercrafting in no time and Scandinavian Needlecraft in recent months and loved them both. So I was really interested to see her new kids craft book Find it, Make it.

I don't have kids (or neices or nephews either...) but I grew up making things and tried to judge this book based on whether or not I thought my younger self would have wanted it for Christmas :)


Find it, Make it contains "35 step-by-step projects using found and natural materials". The book starts with a section called "getting ready", about what you'll need for the projects, and at the back there's a useful chart of items to collect on your walks / from your garden.

The projects themselves are divided into "play and display" (a pressed flower picture, letters made from painted twigs, a shell wind chime), "playtime" (twig boats, handmade paper with leaves and flowers in it), "gift ideas and jewellery"(a slate brooch, printed giftwrap, and an amazing ice bowl full of flowers), "colourful characters" and "amazing animals" (herb head flower pots, pinecone bugs, and a sweet pebble owl family).


Each project includes a list of suggested materials, any extra "words of wisdom" about working with or preparing the materials and step-by-step instructions, each of which is illustrated with a how-to photo showing a child doing that step. Any templates needed are included in the back, and are all full size. Very helpfully, child-friendly instructions are also included for how to copy the templates out of the book.


There's a bit of talk in the book about how "green" these projects are, but really I think this is quite an old fashioned (in a good way) craft book - a book to get kids exploring the outdoors to find materials, and then giving them lots of ideas for making fun crafty things with what they find.

You could sneak in a lot of facts about the natural world while working on projects from this book with your kids, and using found materials plus basic crafty supplies like glue and paint and ribbon makes the projects very inexpensive. I think my younger self would have had a lot of fun with this book in the Easter and summer holidays... but as I'm a bit old for it now I'm giving away my review copy, which is a lovely hardback. Hurrah!

Just leave a comment on this blog post for a chance to win. (If you're reading this on my Facebook page please click through to my blog to leave your comment on the original post).

As always, I'm happy to ship internationally, so anyone can enter. Leave your comment before 10pm on Friday 29th April and I'll pick a winner at random on Saturday 30th.

Please make sure you leave a name or pseudonym (no anonymous comments please!) and leave a link or email address so I can contact you.

P.S. there's going to be another crafty giveaway tomorrow :)

Find it, Make it is available from CICO Books, Amazon UK, Amazon USA, The Book Depository and many other bookshops.

[Disclaimer: CICO Books sent me a free review copy of this book, and the Amazon & Book Depository links in this post are affiliate links]

*** This giveaway is now closed ***