Libraries are more than books. Accumulated craft supplies--what can be done? I gleaned the following from PUBYAC contributors. If you're a member, check out the archives for 9-2-09. Please add YOUR comments. Your colleagues would appreciate hearing what works, and what didn't!

see also: 3D Art Sculpture

Name it:

• "Art in a Bag"
• Craft BINGO
• Open Ended Craft Day

• Craft Buffet

• DIY in the Library

• Scrap-Box Craft Day
• Recycling Program
• Trash to Treasures

Have your patrons make:

• Artistic Creations  
• Board Games
• Bookbags
• Collages
• Create a … (Alien, Creature, Fairy, Monster, Mr. Potato-Head, Wild Thing)
• Gifts for Grandparents
• Inventions
• Masks
• Robots
• Self-portraits

HOW?

• This is easy--with very little supervision, or direction needed.
• Put a variety of craft materials into brown paper bags, staple shut, and then when the kids come to the program, they choose a bag, and try to make something from their stuff.
• A table is suggested--to hold boxes of fabric, ribbons, fake flowers, glue, pins, paper clips, tape, etc. to assist the kids in securing all the different odds & ends together.

• Encourage everyone to take home anything except the scissors, glue and tape.

"Aliens Invade the Library" program, very popular with boys and their fathers. Among other things, we made alien costumes and then had a photo-shoot of young aliens invading the library. Use a variety of left-over craft materials -- garbage bags for the costume bodies, glittery pipe cleaners for antennae, etc. Let me tell you, though, if you are making alien costumes you want shiny discs. Kids used them as big medallions around their necks, as wrist devices, as shiny armor attached to their garbage bagged bodies. One girl drew an eye on a disc and hung it between her own eyes. She became a freaky looking Cyclops. One mother made herself a science fiction crown.--PUBYAC 11-2010