I bought a lot of the stained glass coloring books from Dover Publications and eventually expanded out into buying the kits. Annabelle loves to color and when I come across something that is art related I know that there is a good chance that she will love it. After having a lot of fun with several of the stencil books I ordered a handful of seasonal ones to fill out an order from the Dover website. Most of them were priced between $1.00 and $1.25 so it wasn't like they cost an arm and a leg and even if she only used them a few times, it would be worth it. The only thing that I don’t like about this particular series is that they are made from card stock instead of plastic. I know, that reduces the price but I would rather pay a little more and get something that can be used longer than something that will get trashed in a matter of days.

Dover Publications Fun With Easter Stencils

Normally when you think of stencils you think 'plastic'; they are sturdy, can be washed and reused over and over. Sadly, these aren't made of plastic but with a little bit of care they can be used more than a few times. If you are into crafts they can be used to decorate toy boxes, walls and create borders and if you like to decorate cakes, the stencils can be used with spray on edible color mist products or for the old school crowd there is always airbrushing. Most people will buy these for kids to use to trace and draw with but if you use a little imagination, the sky is the limit.

There are a total of six stencils in the books and most of them are really cute. The end result depends on how much time and effort you want to put into them, a great example of that is the bunny. From the book its cute but if you add some color to the eye or some contrasting color to the inside of the ear it looks a lot better. The egg stencil has a good bit of detail to it but as I said, if you are willing to put a little more effort into adding different colors you will get something that looks a lot better. The only one that we didn't use was the flower pattern, I didn’t have a use for it on anything and Annabelle wasn't into it at all. If you are into animals there are three in this stencil book, a cute chick, happy bunny and plump lamb. They have a minimal amount of detail to them but you can add some extra color to them or have them attached to each other to create a pattern or border.

Out of the six the one that saw the most use was the basket of eggs. It was also the one that was most time consuming because someone wanted the eggs in different colors and wanted to add a wicker design to the basket. That's all fine and good but come on, I don't have an hour to sit there and add in rows and rows of lines for her with a ruler. She did watch we do a few of them and tried it on her own but the lines were far from being straight and she ended up with more ink on the sides of her hands than on the paper. Even if there was just the basket of eggs stencil in the book, the amount of use she got from it more than justified the cost of it.

Most retail stores don’t carry these because they just can't make a huge profit on them or at least enough to justify the space that they take up. I have seen them at Michaels from time to time but never a huge assortment. This is a seasonal item so it might surface at stores about a month before Easter but it is something that you can order read round from the Dover Publications website. This makes for a cute thing to add to Easter baskets or if kids want to make their own greeting cards but because of the card stock they aren't something that will last all that long if they aren't careful with them.

The Bottom Line

Dover has a lot of really cool stencil books to choose from; some of them are plastic and some are card stock so you do need to read the description of them before you order. These are inexpensive books that kids can have a lot of fun with but at the same time they can be used for disposable templates when painting or airbrushing. They do work out well with spray paint too and you will get more use out of them with spray paint than regular paint but eventually you will need to pitch them and get another book to work with.


As always, thanks for the visit…

~^V^~ Freak ~^V^~

© 2008 Freak369




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Recommended: Yes