Sumikko Gurashi are the most popular San-X characters with Japanese kids by far and that’s led to a truly incredible range of kid-friendly craft kits and books that cover everything from needlecrafts and baking to making your own toys and stationery. Here’s a look at some recent ones I’ve found. All these shops ship internationally from Japan but you should be able to find many of the books and kits at other shops too.
Amazon Japan is a great place to start as they stock all the big toy brands that have Sumikko Gurashi kits. There are so many surprising things to try but this Sparkling Snow Globe kit caught my eye first. It includes a range of mix and match plastic pieces that you can fill with water and sparkles to create mini snow globes that can be decorated with the included stickers and even worn as accessories.
This Squishy Charm kit also deserves a mention as there’s enough parts and decorations to make 15 shaker charms. It also includes a battery-operated sealing machine that you could probably use to keep making your own charms from waste plastic. Other kits on Amazon include Whipple decoden, perler beads, stationery and bag-making.
There have been lots of Sumikko Gurashi craft books and the latest release is Sumikko Gurashi Cute Felt Playhouse, which you can order from CDJapan & Amazon. There’s a preview of the full book at the first link and this is as simple as it gets as all the felt pieces are included and you are just assembling things with velcro! It’s quite affordable and extremely cute so I’m tempted to get one. You’ll also find more advanced craft books including perler beads, embroidery, crochet and baking – the San-X shop has a good range but doesn’t ship outside Japan so grab the title or ISBN and find it on CDJapan & Amazon.
Plaza Japan has a big choice of Sumikko Gurashi activities including jigsaw puzzles, origami, paper theatres and these ONOEMAN First Sewing Kits. They’re perfect for absolute beginners as it includes pre-cut felt pieces with holes for the stitches. Most of the gang get a kit, some with their little Minikko friend too. I’ve made one of these before with Pompompurin if you want to see how it works.
Felissimo has teamed up with craft company Couturier for a series of adorable crochet, knitting, cross stitch and needlefelting kits with everything you need to make the characters. This is a subscription where you get a new part each month – for example the fruity crochet set is 6 parts with 2 characters in each. You can order internationally but many of the individual kits – including older discontinued sets – are for sale on Mercari (similar to Ebay) and you can order internationally via their Buyee forwarding service.
Remember that all books and kit instructions will be in Japanese but the camera option in the Google Translate app is a huge help with this and most will be aimed at kids so simple enough to figure out.
Weirdly, there are very few new free DIYs but we have some Sumikko Gurashi projects in the archives.
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