BOOK REVIEW: Disney Ideas Book by Elizabeth Dowsett

Stephanie O'Connell | 6 October 2018 | Reply

BOOK REVIEW: Disney Ideas Book by Elizabeth Dowsett

Dorling Kindersley
October 2018
Hardcover, $39.99
Reviewed by Steph O’Connell

Activity Books / Arts & Craft / Media Tie-In

10/10

Bring your love of Disney to life with more than 100 amazing and creative projects and activities. Let your imagination run wild with Disney inspired arts and crafts, party games, puzzles, papercraft, and many more fun and practical activities. With clear, step-by-step instructions, the Disney Ideas Book guides you through each exciting activity from creating glowing BFG Dream Jars and performing a puppet show in a Jungle Bookshoebox theatre, to playing skittles with the Seven Dwarfs and growing grass hair on Frozen Trolls. Featuring family favourite characters from animation and live-action movies and TV, including Frozen, Toy Story, Moana, Inside Out and Cinderella.

The activities are suitable for kids and adults alike, whatever their level of ability. There are top tips on every page from expert crafters to help make your creations a success, as well as fun Disney facts to pore over. With the Disney Ideas Book, your family will never be bored again.

Every so often, a book comes into a person’s life that they can’t help but fall head-over-heels in love with. Sometimes it’s love at first sight, with a realisation that the contents of the book do not live up to the cover and description, but in the case of Disney Ideas Book, the reader’s (or in this case “craft do-er’s”) immediate infatuation is totally justified.

With dual tables of contents (one listing activities in order, the other with related activities grouped together under the name of the movie) kids and adults with a range of interests are bound to find something fun to create.

Within these pages, you will find activities inspired by the more recent Disney hits (such as Frozen, Brave, Coco, Inside Out, Moana, Wall-E, and Tangled) as well as those that the grown ups remember and love from their own childhoods (Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Hercules, Cinderella, The Little Mermaid, and The Lion King).

Complexity ranges from items that only require a couple of steps through to the long and involved items of a couple hours’ work which will go on to decorate the house for a long time thereafter, and ingredients range from the cheap and super easy to obtain (toilet rolls, egg cartons, cardboard boxes, wool, clay, and PVA glue) to the more expensive and more complex, more difficult to obtain, and even seasonal items (polymer clay, shrink plastic, clear plastic spheres that divide in half, and carving pumpkins).

This is the kind of book that would do amazingly well in every home with kids (or grown-ups who are still kids at heart) especially over school holidays (the longer the better), and a must have for anyone who works with children and is always looking for the next great craft idea to implement with the kids.

As it only turned up a couple of weeks ago, I haven’t had a chance to try out all of the projects within, of course, but enough of them to know that this is a good investment. It has to be one of my favourite crafts books in a long time, and if you don’t have it in your life you’re definitely missing out.