Florence is a big craft fan and would happily spend hours upon dedicated hours paying great attention to detail in her work. She’s only three but already is very artistic and I’m extremely proud of how clever she is with it. She colours inside the lines, can draw people with heads, bodies, limbs and proper faces with hair and I just love to watch her work before proudly displaying the latest on our fridge.

She loves anything crafty really and because she loves to make things so much I do like to encourage her and arrange for her to do different arty activities. For her birthday we even held her party at ‘The Craft Cabin’ a dedicated crafty cafe for children, as I knew she would absolutely love it – she did! I would say she colours, paints and glues most days so sometimes I like to find new ways to excite her artistic penchant and this week we’ve been using ‘Badge It’ by Bandai (£20), a metal badge making machine which allows you to make professional looking badges from whatever pictures you like; be they ones you have drawn yourself or things cut out from a magazine (an excellent way to recycle all those children’s magazine’s Florence loves so much)! The machine is intended for use by children aged 6 and over but I just knew it would be something Florence would enjoy and decided we could do it together.

Just before we were going to try out the ‘Badge It’ machine and the thing which sealed the deal that it would be for us was when I noticed my 12-year-old sister wearing a really funky badge. I commented on it and she said ‘Oh, I made it with ‘Badge It’… Seems we may be late to the ‘Badge It’ party then… My sister Phoebe said she’s had hers for years and loves it! So, what did we make of it then?

Florence has been looking at the box and itching to give it a go for over a week now so was thrilled to unpack the contents!

We waited until Daddy took Jimmy to the shops as we knew there would be lots of little bits and we’d need a bit of concentration and then we un-packed our new ‘Badge It’ machine and the contents it comes with. As well as the machine itself it comes with 15 badge backs, fronts, pins, shiny covers, a choices of pre-designed badges and a template to cut out your own. We laid everything out on the table and made sure everything was present – it was.

We made sure we had everything then chose one of the pre-designed badges to start with. She loves a Union Jack, or a ‘Jubilee’ as she calls it so went with that one!

The process was really simple!

You have to put a badge front in the first drawer then top it with your badge choice. Next lay over the shiny cover and push the drawer back in. You then have to hold on to one of the handles as you twist the top down until it clicks then back up again until it clicks. Florence could do all of these things (with supervision) but needed a little help for the last twists to make it click. Once that stage is done you turn the machine around and place a badge back inside the second drawer before pushing it in and repeating the same twist and click process. And that’s it. Badge made!

Pulling out the drawer to reveal her new badge was very exciting! I couldn’t believe how easy it was and how professional the badge looked!

One more step to go of popping on the badge pin and we had ourselves a badge to wear! Florence lined it up and I pushed it in to make sure it was popped on properly!

The finished badge!

Florence was very pleased with her new hand-made badge!

Well, one wasn’t enough and she wanted to make some more so we thought we would experiment. You can use any picture including print outs of photographs you’ve taken so we thought we’d have a delve around in some old magazines. We thought Daddy would like a guitar badge so had a look through one of his old guitar magazines, chose a picture from one of Florence’s princess magazines and we also used a picture of Florence from a catalogue she modelled for.

Choosing pictures from magazines and catalogues!

Using the template we found the pictures we wanted and drew in the lines provided so we would know where to cut around.

The results!

We really enjoyed making the badges, found the machine very easy to use and the instructions simple to follow. We made 6 badges in total and had a lovely hour doing it. The first thing Florence said this morning was ‘Can I make some more badges?’ So it was definitely a hit with her! I think we’ll get creative next time and draw some pictures to put in badges and I have plans to make all of Jimmy and Florence’s friends a badge with their faces on to pin to the goodie bags I will be doing at Jimmy’s first birthday party. I think we’re going to be keeping Bandai in business buying re-fills for this one! The re-fills available to buy come in packs of 30 and aren’t too badly priced. I think that although this product is intented for ages 6+, if you have a creative little one and don’t mind doing it with them then they will really enjoy it and it has great longevity. My sister is 12 and apparently has had hers for years so even tweens and teens could get fun out of it! I can completely understand why children like it, it’s really exciting getting a professional looking badge at the end of it! Great!

Lots of fun creating some really great badges!

I was not paid to write this post but was sent a product for the purpose of review.