Wild and Free Handcrafts: 32 Activities to Build Confidence, Creativity, and Skill

The companion to The Call of the Wild + Free: styled in the lush aesthetic of the Wild + Free brand, a four-color book offering crafts, activities, and essays, that parents, educators, and caregivers can use to inspire their children.

Wild + Free Handcrafts is a beautiful, four-color resource book for parents, educators, and caregivers to enjoy doing hands-on activities with kids. A handcraft engages one’s hands, requires a level of learned skill, encourages children to do their best work, and produces an end product that is useful. It has been used in homeschool settings for decades as one way to encourage them to work with their hands and discover a skillful craft they love to practice. It also is a great way for traditionally educated kids who are home for the summer, or in afterschool programs, or with their families on the weekends, to do fun, screen-free activities that will stimulate their imaginations and creativity.

This book will feature a variety of nature crafts such as:

• Felted acorns

• Paper beads

• Nature wreaths

• Cocoa mint lip balm

• Woven willow hearts

• Finger knit bracelets

• Eco-dyed kitchen towels

• Fairy tale treehouse

• Flower crowns

• Bug hotel

With the same lush photography as The Call of the Wild + Free, this book includes step-by-step pictures that show parents how to do the craft, and essays on the usefulness and purpose of handcrafts as a tool to spark children’s curiosity and wonder.

Ainsley Arment is the founder and leader of Wild + Free, cohost of the weekly Wild + Free podcast, and author of The Call of the Wild + Free. As she leads this movement of raising kids and homeschooling in a new way, she thinks deeply about making the most of life and ensuring that her children have a fertile seedbed for their own uniqueness and creativity. She and her husband, Ben, are raising their five kids, Wyatt, Dylan, Cody, Annie, and Millie, in Virginia Beach.