The craft making has been essentially connected to early childhood education and action of day care in Europe. Several philosophers of the education have considered the craft making as the child's natural action and useful to the child's development, for example Fröbel (1782 - 1852) and Rousseau (1712 - 1778). The craft making has special significance in the Finnish kindergarten and school system and craft making has been a separate school subject for roughly 150 years, all though the meaning of crafts has undergone many social and cultural changes. (Yliverronen, Rönkkö & Korhonen 2011.) The craft making has retained its significance as qualitative production but its role has become significant in craft expression more than in the economic objectives. In other parts of the world, craft making has disappeared as a subject due to social changes or it has been included in technology, art, household or work education. (Karppinen 2005, 102; Pöllänen 2009, 250.)

Craft making educates children by requiring them to design, build, create and problem solve. In craft making there is the development of the problem-solving skills and child's thinking skills, but also the development of the self-esteem through the joy of the success and through received feedback. So craft making affect many significant areas of child development, including bodily perception, motor coordination, visual perception and concentration (see e.g. Kojonkoski-Rännäli 2002; National Curriculum Guidelines on Early Childhood Education and Care in Finland 2004, 20–25).

Many teachers find it hard to help children design and guide the process of designing to connect with the goals of learning. In this study we use fictional literature and children´s narratives and illustrations to guide children´s designing of a craft product. The aim of this study is to explore how children take advantage of stories when designing and manufacturing craft products. This refers to what kind of elements and details children pick from their narratives and fictional literature before designing and producing of craft product. In the study, children's activity is controlled by adult functions. Adults give the children boundary conditions and learning objectives. Based on the results, it is possible to draw conclusions about capability of children to take advantage of materials coming from their other activities when making a craft product.

From the point of view of crafts, the most important concept of this study is holistic craft. The holistic craft process is based on the thought that all the phases are conducted by the same person (Kojonkoski-Rännäli, 1995, 61, 92–95). Holistic craft comprises all the phases of the craft-making process: The maker is in charge of developing ideas, designing, preparing, and finally assessing the artefact and the production process (see, e.g., Pöllänen, 2009, 251).

The narratives in this study are anticipatory stories. The concept of an anticipatory story means guessing the continuation of a fragment of a fictional text. The fictional text used in this study is Will Buckingham´s story “The Snorgh”. In anticipatory stories the aim is to write a text that stylistically and substantively complies with the original text and corresponds to the author’s understanding of how the original text proceeds.

In our study, the children cannot write the anticipatory stories themselves due to their lack of writing skills and they narrate their stories by storycrafting. The storycrafting method was developed in Finland (Riihelä, 1991) to reach the creativity of a child on his/her own terms. It resembles to LEA-method used in the USA. The utility of storycrafting is based on the fact that in storycrafting the difficulties in writing do not prevent the narrator of telling the story as wanted. (Karlsson, 2004.)

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