Off

4 Places to Find Inspiration for Craft Projects

Crafting is catching on, especially among younger people, according to the Association for Creative Industries. The craft industry, which includes 75,000 retail outlets in the U.S., is now worth $36 billion. Edible crafts, painting and drawing, and kids’ crafts are the most popular crafting hobbies, followed by sewing and paper crafts.

(Photo: Shutterstock)

While the popularity of the hobby has made crafting materials more widely available, one perennial challenge for crafters is finding sources of inspiration for new projects. Fortunately, inspirational sources are all around you, if you know where to look. Here are four places to find inspiration for crafting projects:

Everyday items

If you are looking for craft ideas, a great place to start is by looking at everyday objects you already have around your house. Take beer glasses, for instance. The craft beer scene has become a lifestyle. If you are a beer lover, there are many ways you can use glasses to express your enthusiasm. Instead of seeing a beer glass as just something to drink from, try picturing it as a lamp, a candle holder or a flower vase. If you need just the right touch for a project, consider buying decorative beer glasses. Other everyday household items you can use for crafts include coffee cups, bottles, egg cartons, ice cube trays and shoe boxes.

Nature

Nature can be another rich source of craft inspiration. If you take a stroll in the woods, you may find branches, leaves and wildflowers you can use to make a wreath. Drawing or painting geometric patterns on rocks can be another fun project, recommends KC Edventures. Or you can take a trip to the beach to collect seashells to paint, says Fun-a-Day. Other nature-inspired craft ideas include making sculptures out of driftwood, coating a cardboard star with peanut butter and birdseed as a bird feeder, gluing plastic eyes onto pinecones or using sidewalk chalk to decorate a tree in your yard.

Travel

Traveling can be another inspiration for creative crafting ideas. One way to draw inspiration from travel is to use maps for decorations. For instance, you can hang up a colorful wall map and decorate it with lights highlighting where you have traveled. You can also hang up a wooden board with the states outlined in marker and paint, and label the states you have visited. Another variation on this theme is to cover states you have visited with photos you took during your trip.

Other travel-themed craft ideas include map magnets, painted globes and travel keepsake boxes where you can store souvenirs from your trips. For more inspiration, visit crafts stores and shows when you travel to get ideas from other places.

Holidays

Holidays are another way to get inspired by craft ideas. For Valentine’s Day, a simple way to give a sweet message is to sew two newly fallen leaves together and place a note inside. Halloween decorating can inspire many craft ideas, such as using a faux pumpkin as a framework for a diorama showing a spooky scene. Christmas craft ideas include turning an array of clothespins into a snowflake, personalizing plates for Santa’s cookies, turning a vanilla-frosted cupcake into a snow globe under glass. Just about any holiday can serve as spark for crafting creativity.

Everyday home items, natural objects, travel and holidays are four ready resources for crafting inspiration. Sources for crafting ideas are literally everywhere. Once you get in the habit of building creative craft projects, you will find that the inspiration starts flowing, and you will soon be coming up with your own original ideas.