Crafty Girl: Fun & Games

By Jennifer Traig

Over forty fantastic ideas for creating your own activities and games that will make any time a good time.

Bored in the backyard? Restless in your room? What’s a crafty girl to do? Plenty. The trick to keeping the good times rolling is to craft like crazy. If you’re restless in your room, bored in the backyard, or twiddling your thumbs on a long road trip, Crafty Girl: Fun and Games is your lifetime membership to the crafty carnival.

Start by breaking the rules with Autobiographical Board Games. Go nuts in the kitchen with Kitchen Sink Cookies and other kooky experiments. Get busy with a Soda Bottle Bowling tournament or an afternoon of Hallway Croquet. Whip up some homemade art supplies and start your masterpiece or play a quick game of Custom Car-Bingo. With more than forty ideas for every variation on fun you can possibly imagine, Crafty Girl: Fun and Games will help you banish boredom forever.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Aug 27, 2013
• ISBN: 9781452133652

Jennifer Traig

Jennifer Traig is the author of Devil in the Details  and Well Enough Alone, and the editor of The Autobiographer’s Handbook  and Don’t Forget to Write. She holds a PhD in English from Brandeis, and lives with her family in Michigan.

Book preview

You’re a Crafty Girl. Fun is your middle name and Games is your second middle name. You don’t even know the meaning of the word bored. You never run out of ideas, and you never stop looking for new ones. That’s where Crafty Girl: Fun & Games comes in, with loads of ideas for crafty good times.

You already know that fun is more fun when you make it yourself. Sure, board games are okay, but an Autobiographical Board Game (page 52), a game you’ve made to reflect your world, is a riot. Twister is fun, but do-it-yourself Twist and Shout (page 50) is extremely fun. On family road trips, car bingo is mildly entertaining, but Custom Car-Bingo (page 56) really makes the miles fly by. A game is not really fun for you unless you’ve colored, cut, and pasted it yourself.

This is not to say you’re spending all day hunched over cardboard and crayons. You have as much fun outdoors as you do indoors. The recipes in "Part 1: Fresh Air Fun" will help you do just that. You can transform your yard into a Magical Mini-Golf (page 16) course or a launching pad for your Seltzer Sputnik (page 25). You can get the whole neighborhood together for a Crafty Scavenger Hunt (page 31). When you’ve got a light wind, a paper bag, and a spare half-hour on your hands, you can Go Fly a Kite (page 22).

Even when the skies are stormy, you forecast fun. The projects in "Part 2: Rainy Day Doings" will cure your cabin fever. Transform any corridor into a lane for Soda Bottle Bowling (page 38), a field for Hallway Croquet (page 41), or a course for the Light-as-a-Feather Foam Glider (page 36). Try all these events at once for an afternoon of indoor Olympics.

Maybe your thing is cloak-and-dagger crafts, or maybe most of your crafting is done in the lab. "Part 3: Spy Supplies and Mad Scientist Materials" will provide the top-secret recipes you need to get the job done. Make secret agent surveillance tools like Cryptology Crafts (page 68) or Counterintelligence Booby Traps (page 72). Synthesize substances previously unknown to humankind, like Sparkle Slime (page 76) and Shape-Shifting Ooey-Goo (page 78). Is the world ready for these crafty chemical creations? You’ll have to make them to find out.

An artsy Crafty Girl does a little time in the painting, drawing, and sculpting department, too. You’re so crafty, you make your own craft supplies, and the recipes in "Part 4: Color Chemistry" will show you how. Need paint? Whip up a batch of Whirlwind Watercolors (page 84), Fast-Food Finger Paints (page 86), or Puffy Paint (page 94). Need clay? Cook up a pound of Play Clay (page 88) in an instant. Color you crafty.

Here’s a universal truth: Fun is more fun when it’s frosted. The recipes in "Part 5: Kitchen Chaos" will let you play with your food. Craft yourself a creative snack like Sugar Glass (page 106) or Invent Your Own Ice Cream (page 111). If your tastes run to snips, snails, and puppy dog tails rather than sugar, spice, and everything nice, you’ll find plenty to chew on, too. Mix up some Fudge Sludge (page 108), Swamp Cake (page 113), or Banana Slugs (page 115). If your friends think it’s gross, all the better—more for you.

Crafty Girl: Fun & Games has a heap of ideas for you, no matter what kind of Crafty Girl you are—even if you’re a Crafty Boy, a Crafty Woman, or a Crafty Man. Even if you’re a Crafty Pet (be warned, however, that most of these projects require opposable thumbs, so if you’re a dog, a cat, or a hamster, you’re going to have to ask your master for help with the scissors). If you’re a Crafty Babysitter, this book should be part of your emergency entertainment kit. The kids will be so busy with Bubble Brew (page 27), you’ll have plenty of free time to raid the fridge and run up the phone bill, but you probably won’t want to—you’ll be more tempted to blow a few bubbles yourself.

So, what are you waiting for? You have most of