Hooked on Rainbow Loom®

My fellow blogger, Laura Sassi, posted during the summer about the buzz circulating around the Rainbow Loom®.  (Please click here to check out her wonderful post at Laura Sassi Tales.)  I am here to tell you that the buzz is still buzzing!

This has to be one of those IT items.  The kind of IT item that you wished you had thought to invest in way before it ever became an IT item.

Every kid in my son’s first grade class, and I mean EVERYONE, both the boys and the girls, is making bracelets and necklaces.

There’s the standard fishtail, the fancier starburst pattern, and of course, there’s the highly desirable hexafish 6-pin fishtail.  The latter is all the rage among the first graders.

Over the weekend, after spending hours reworking my bracelets, I mastered the starburst and hexafish 6-pin fishtail.  Applause please!  With many of these patterns if you make just one mistake, you have to start all over again, or face the possibility of unraveling.  (See the painstaking similarities to writing and rewriting?)

My son and I took turns on the hexafish 6-pin fishtail necklace that he wanted in blue and white.  Originally, he wanted to use the glow in the dark elastics, but we didn’t have enough, and the few that we had kept snapping.  (These glow in the dark elastics, I might add, are extremely rare.  On the black market, I bet you could get a pretty penny for these babies.  You didn’t hear it from me! :))

There are so many wonderful things about kids making these bracelets.  One is that it requires patience.  There’s a high probability that as you start doing the more complicated bracelets, you will make mistakes and have to start over again.  And again.  And again.  Then, there’s the fact that the kids are not tuned into electronics.  There’s one exception to this, and that’s watching the instructional videos.  And a good number of these videos are done by kids.  How cool is that?

After watching hours of Ashley and Rob’s instructional videos on how to make the starburst and the hexafish 6-pin fishtail, both my son and I feel like they’re practically family.  (On an aside, Ashley Steph’s instructional YouTube video, How to Make a Starburst Rainbow Loom® Bracelet, has been watched by 3,001,025 viewers.  Holy Cannoli, that’s a lot of viewers!) And of course, now my son wants to make a video too!

So, you may see us on the video scene soon.  But first, I think we’re going to attempt the waterfall wave bracelet.  Wish us luck!

p.s. Please click here for the official Rainbow Loom® website.