The benefits of a glue gun ... ...

Today the kids got round to making up some of the craft kits we've bought them, and as usually we ran into trouble quite early on.

Both my wife and I are pretty good at crafts in general, but when it comes to some things we always have the same issue, that being glue.

Kids and glue don't really mix well, and depending on the glue it can get quite stressful for the kids, mainly because they want their creations last week, and waiting for glue to dry doesn't always go down well.


So what to do ? you could use a faster drying glue (like super glue) but this isn't really good with kids about, and fingers stick together very quickly ;-) normally a half decent pva glue will be okay, but there's still a certain amount of waiting for it to dry, and when you get craft kits like the ones my kids did today then pva isn't going to cut it.

Here's the finished creatures -

My son did bugs.

My daughter did a polar bear and an elephant.

 As you can see these are basically pompoms and pipe cleaners, even super glue struggled to get these fixed together quickly, so we brought in the humble glue gun, obviously a glue gun needs care and attention when using it, because the glue can get very hot, so adult supervision is a must, but that doesn't mean you should teach your kids to use one.

My old glue gun -

A bit battered, but still works well.

The glue gun solves a couple of problems, the first being that it takes about a minute for the glue to cool enough for a good fixing, and the other is you get a strong fixing so what ever the kids have made should last a while.

You can get a glue gun from most diy type shops (B&Q Homebase etc) and the glue sticks are pretty cheap, the normal clear sticks can be found in pound shops, and you can even get coloured glue sticks and ones with added glitter as well, so they are quite versatile for any number of crafting jobs.

So get a glue gun, and as long as you supervise the kids and teach them how to use it properly you'll be on to a winner as you'll be able to get stuff stuck a lot quicker, from now on we'll mostly be using glue guns !

Thanks for reading.