Creative Kits

Two kinds of making, in one place

Everything here arrives as a box with a project inside it and nothing missing. What differs is the tool in your hand: a knife or a brush.

The carving kits are for taking wood away – a blank, a sharp knife, and a figure that emerges as material is removed. The paint kits are the opposite: layers that build into a shape, and colour added to each one. One is subtractive and one is additive, which is the oldest division in making anything.

What is in a carving kit?

A real knife with a real edge, in high-carbon steel hardened to 57–59 HRC, made by BeaverCraft in Ukraine. The carving kits are marked from fourteen, with an adult alongside for younger carvers, and they are not toys.

The box holds everything needed to finish the project: the knife, one or more wood blanks, a pattern in most, cut-resistant tape, and depending on the kit a leather strop with polishing compound, sandpaper and beeswax. There is nothing else to buy.

Some blanks arrive pre-cut to the rough outline of the figure – the comfort bird, the Dala horse, the kuksa cup, the love spoon – which removes the stage where most beginners give up. Others arrive as plain blocks and the figure has to be found inside them. The product pages say which is which, and it is the single most useful thing to know before choosing.

One thing worth understanding if you are buying for a younger carver: in this craft the blunt knife is the dangerous one. A sharp blade slices where it is aimed; a dull one has to be forced, and force is what makes it slip. The tape goes on the hand holding the wood.

How do the paint kits work?

Five or six laser-cut wooden layers that glue into a standing figure, six pots of acrylic paint, a brush and a glue stick. Nothing else is needed, and the paint kits are marked from seven.

The layers are the point. Assembled, they sit at different depths, and the animal's silhouette frames a landscape behind it: forest and mountains inside a wolf, a savannah at dusk inside an elephant, a beach and a sunset inside a turtle. You are not colouring in an outline – you are painting a scene that already has depth.

Paint first, then glue. Each layer is painted flat on the table and the stack is built only when everything is dry, because once the layers are glued the deepest parts of the scene are out of any brush's reach. The layers are numbered, so the order is never in doubt.

Which kit for whom?

A paint kit suits a child of seven and up, an adult who wants a quiet evening, or the two of them at the same table. There is nothing sharp, the paint is water-based acrylic that washes off while wet, and the result is good almost regardless of skill because the shadows between layers do half the work.

A carving kit suits someone who wants to learn a craft rather than complete a project. The first bird will not be the bird on the box. The second one, from the second blank most kits include, usually is – and that progression is what people come back for.

The building sets and learning games that also appear on this page belong to our Puzzles & Games range; they are here because a construction set is a kit of a kind too.

What are these instead of?

An evening without a screen, mostly. Both ranges take an evening or two of attention and produce an object at the end of it, which is not true of most things people do to relax.

They also both leave something behind. A carved bird sits in a palm; a painted layered animal stands on a shelf. Neither is consumed by the doing of it.

Who makes them?

The carving kits are made by BeaverCraft, who started in Kyiv in 2014 because two friends could not find a carving knife that stayed sharp, and whose tools are now used in over 160 countries. Every cutting tool is tested by hand before packing – used on a piece of wood, not merely inspected.

The paint kits are our own design, made in Ukraine.