Mister Maker 3D Alien Puppet Show Craft Kit review

At the start of the school holidays, we were sent a lovely Mister Maker craft kit to try out. As soon as the girls saw the name Mister Maker, they got all excited and asked if there would be googly eyes like on TV. Well, I'm pleased to say, the answer was YES ! But that's not all there was.

Once you take the outer wrap off, you're left with a sturdy blue box. Not only this makes it a doddle to keep all the little bits together in one place before it's all finished, but it also becomes an integral part of the puppet show itself, turning into the theatre. Certainly no excess packaging here !

Once everything is unpacked, you get an impressive array of crafty bits, from felt tips and glue sticks to pom poms and cardboard shapes waiting to be coloured. Oh, and the googly eyes, of course !

6-year-old Juliette excitedly came and sorted through it all, constantly going "wow" and "ooh" and "look what I've found, Mum" !

While she was doing that, I started looking at the instructions. My initial instinct was to panic because there are lots of them - a double-sided A4 sheet with loads of diagrams - but in actual fact, it's all very simple.

Juliette immediately settled down and started colouring in all the different pieces of white card with the felt tips that were included in the box. It's a great crafts kit to take on holiday or to the grandparents' to keep the kids entertained because it contains everything you could possibly need.

And that was actually the end of that day's crafts session because by the time she'd finished colouring everything in carefully, she wanted to get outside in the sunshine and play at the park.

The next time we pulled it out was a couple of weeks later at the grandparents' when the girls, as well as 4-year-old cousin Morgane, needed entertaining on a rainy day. There's plenty of supplies to go round so no squabbling and it was great to see them working together and encouraging each other to get creative. All we needed was a piece of paper as a colouring mat on the table and there wasn't even any mess.

The girls had great fun designing their monsters, choosing the shapes of their bodies, the colours of pompoms and the number of googly eyes to make a really personalised monster (I keep saying monsters, but they're supposed to be aliens - same difference !). 

The glue sticks are just normal Pritt Stick-type glue sticks which I usually only use for paper and cardboard so I was convinced they would be useless for sticking on the pompoms.

But I was proved totally wrong and they stuck perfectly, even when the girls ran around the house wiggling them around and doing scary alien voices ! (And we hadn't even got round to making the puppet theatre yet, so it just goes to show how much it brings out their creativity, not just in an arts and crafts way but also for inventing imaginative stories.)

This was where they stopped for this session - and I'll be perfectly honest and say that we haven't yet had time (what with the fortnight's holiday in Turkey then the back-to-school rush) to finsh off the kit and make the puppet theatre. But we will, especially now as the nights will be drawing in and the trips to the park will be stopping because it's too cold.

The kit is really comprehensive and fires up little artists' imagination. It does take quite a long time to make so be prepared to do it over several sessions, rather than one playdate for example. Make sure your kids know this in advance or they may be disappointed when they don't have a finished object to show off after an afternoon's work (although with older kids, I'm sure it would all come together much more quickly).

star rating : 4.5/5

RRP : £8.99

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