Strange craft kits from the 70s

[Throughhistory]

Anyone else remember them?

Plasticraft - I mean who doesn't want to make a penny embedded in a plastic blob?

Enamelcraft - at least that resulted in a few hardly wearable items of jewellery

A board covered in black velvet. You banged small nails in, then wound gold thread from one nail to another to create the illusion of curves in a picture, often a boat. Yes really.

Did I miss out on any gems?

I loved Plasticraft - can still remember that smell of molten plastic now. My DM still had a plasticraft key ring that I made as a child with her house keys on in her handbag when she died in 2016 - she was 87 and I was 53!

@LApprentiSorcier They are a delight! The paper is stiff, almost card, and smooth so my felts don't bleed at all. A pleasure to use. TBH I don't remember the originals well enough to compare - though these are off-square, whereas the originals were definitely rectangular.

@GuppytheCat Any excuse will do

I had a flowerpress. I made my mum a pressed flower bookmark and lost interest after that.
White flowers always came out brown.

Oh, that's good to hear @Dilbertian. They'll be going onto my Amazon wishlist!

I haven't seen them since the early 80s but I think the paper was always good quality in those days. I seem to remember both square (ish) and rectangular pads but the mists of time may be fogging my recollections.

There are various craft subscriptions available online, where each month you get a new craft to try. I have one and have enjoyed re living my childhood crafting, making baskets, macrame holders, felting, lino cuts, papercrafting, weaving, candle making, knitting, beading and all sorts

I am a disaster at sewing but for a brief phase in the 80s, I thought I was a mini Coco Chanel, having discovered the wonder that were Clothkits: pre cut, highly patterned pieces that you sewed into ‘eye catching’ fashion pieces.

Clothkits was wonderful! I had loads of their clothes. Lovely cord trousers with a printed design around the hems. Sleeveless patterned jackets with furry stuff inside. I still have one of these dating from the late 70s and I am furious with myself for getting rid of so many other outfits, they are collector’s items today.

Apparently someone did their PhD on Clothkits. Probably with reference to the middle-class take up. When you saw some other kids in their Clothkits dungarees and tee shirts you knew they were ‘nice’.

My dm made us cloth kits and the rag dolls.

Things like tiered skirts and jerkins

@Throughhistory

Not a kit, but my grandma made me a frog filled with rice! All my friends loved it so she made one for everyone. Should anyone want a rice filled frog, I still have the pattern

This reminded me of my friend who was in a supermarket, her pal called across the aisle and asked what she was looking for. ‘I need some rice to stuff a frog’ . ‘My God, I didn’t know you were that hard up!’

I had a magic roundabout shaker maker kit but only managed to make one florence because I was too impatient to let them set properly before taking them out of the mould.

I also had a very intricate carboard cut out kit of a canal boat. I must have been a bit too young for it because I remember DM sitting with me helping and supervising every step over many sessions. Then one day she said, 'There you go, we've finished!' But we hadn't finished There was a whole sheet of teeny tiny furniture and little kettles and pans and flowerpots left over. 'Oh no,' she said, 'we're not bothering doing those. You wouldn't be able to see them anyway unless you looked really hard through the windows.' 'Waaaaaaaaahhhhh!' Looking back now, it must have been driving her up the bloody wall

I remember sticking seashells all over flower pots with polyfilla and making papier mache bowls using a balloon.

@Throughhistory

Here's the picture copier/enlarger we were talking about upthread

Sketchagraph! Yes I had one of these. It was shit.

[quote sueelleker]Does anyone else remember Betta-Bilda? I much preferred it to Lego.www.inverso.pt/legos/clones/texts/bettabilda.htm And my sister and I both had Floral Garden sets. Very fiddly, but great fun.www.googleadservices.com/pagead/aclk?sa=L&ai=DChcSEwjR1MjAqc3uAhUM7O0KHf2ZAL4YABAGGgJkZw&ohost=www.google.com&cid=CAASEuRozcZWFAHiIYUu2ZRWpuZCQg&sig=AOD64_3l3bmp4f73Re1Aj9l4ANXP0-kWRQ&ctype=5&q=&ved=2ahUKEwj8jsDAqc3uAhWHfMAKHXDnBzwQ9aACegQIBhBC&adurl=[/quote]
Are you me??!!!

Believe it or not, I still have my Betta Bilda, and my Floral Garden set. Did you have the little dovecote with the world's tiniest doves to go in it?

This was the Things To Make And Do book we had. I did the pebble painted to look like a ladybird that features on the cover.

Not sure if anyone has mentioned the tiny colourful bits that you put into water( in my case,the sink) and they expanded into loads of paper flowers. I have vague memories,unless it was a dream?!

Nobody's mentioned Blue Peter yet. They were always featuring amazing things you could make from washing up liquid bottles and loo roll tubes, so you'd be saving up all this junk and then to your great disappointment, on about week 5 of assembling your amazing project, you'd learn that you needed sticky fucking backed plastic to finish the job.

Who can forget the splendour of the Blue Peter Advent Crown?

@LangClegsInSpace

Who can forget the splendour of the Blue Peter Advent Crown?

Not me - we made it one year. Only trouble was it was too big when we hung it up and would thwack a grown-up in the face as they walked past, so we had to butcher the bottom half.

I had a Linka construction set which was basically plaster of Paris which you poured into moulds to create building parts which fitted together to make model houses. That was the idea.

In my house it was “your moulds needed to be shifted off the table for dinner so I moved them and stacked them on top of each other (or carried them vertically while wet) so I never got past the mix the plaster and fill the moulds. I asked for another table to be able to let them dry but was told I wasn't thinking about other people.

My job sometimes involves using sticky backed plastic. 😤

My respect for the Blue Peter has grown even more.....

Oh, yes. Many a Blue Peter project was beyond my horizons because we had no sticky-backed plastic.

'Why Don't You' (only on over the holidays) was another programme that suggested craft projects and some cookery. My mum got fed up with us cooking 'spaghetti toasties' for lunch, which were shown on there (spaghetti on toast with cheese on top of the spaghetti) and told us we could either have cheese on toast or spaghetti on toast but not both.

Ah yes, Blue Peter. Always using double sided sticky tape for speed.

My first house had been empty for a couple of years, and was full of surprises when I bought it. My delight at finally owning my own place was increased even more when I discovered two rolls of double-sided sticky tape in a kitchen drawer! Something I had only heard of on Blue Peter, and had held me back on many of their projects - a we didn't have any.

I knew about sticky back plastic because we had to cover all our school books in it. I'm still a dab hand at the stuff, much in demand when new library or reading scheme books arrive at the dc's schools

The only yoghurt put we could use for crafts was Ski, because that was the only brand. Yoghurt was considered wildly exotic in our house.

A lack of sticky backed plastic put paid to many a project for me too

Nobody had access to sticky backed plastic in the 1970s. They might just as well have told us to apply gold leaf to our badly sellotaped together assemblages of household junk.

I reckon the BBC just bought up all the stocks of this mythical substance for the blue peter projects.

Great thread!

I spent many a happy hour in my grandfather's office typing out stories from my "Twinkle" annual on my Petite typewriter.

Not toys as such but I've also got fond memories of going into my father's office in about 1978 and someone printing pages and pages on that green and white striped computer paper (the stuff with the spool holes on the side) - from those truly enormous computers - which made up pictures of the Snoopy characters!

Paper dolls and paper clothes you cut out. The clothes had a bit sticking out to fold round the doll.