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We have way too much fun making Demon Slayer anime erasers and badges with craft kits

Katy Kelly Dec 6, 2020
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Some potential gift ideas for the Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba enthusiast in your life!

Craft kits make awesome gifts for kids, especially in Japan, where they have ones that let you make bead versions of your favorite anime and manga characters. They’re coveted by adult fans too, like SoraNews24’s own Saya Togashi, who recently devoured all of Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba and decided to make herself her own Taisho-era puzzle box.

Saya had a specific craft kit in mind, even: the Aqua Beads Kimetsu no Yaiba Bucket Set, a bucket full of craft beads that you set by spraying them with water. with designs to make your own versions of Tanjiro and friends. So she headed out to the craft store a week after the set went on sale…like a complete and utter fool. Demon Slayer is one of the most popular anime in recent history, and with Christmas coming up, plenty of parents are out shopping for their kids. The craft store was completely sold out of the Aqua Beads. Curses!

However, they did have a different brand-new Demon Slayer craft kit in stock, called the the Orikeshi Kimetsu no Yaiba Standard Set.

▼ “Orikeshi” is a Bandai brand of toy that means “Make-Your-Own Eraser”.

Make-Your-Own Eraser sets have been popular for a while, featuring Disney and Pokémon designs, but the Demon Slayer edition (which cost 3,740 yen [US$36]) is brand-new. The main item in the set is the block of eraser material, which comes in 12 specifically selected colors to match the most popular characters in the cast.

▼ The green item is the mold you put the finished eraser into before heating it up to “set” it.

Eight design cards are supplied to help you fashion erasers in pixel likenesses of Tanjiro Kamado, his sister Nezuko, their traveling buddy Zenitsu Agatsuma, boar-headed Inosuke Hashibira, Giyuu Tomioka, the mysterious Pillar Shinobu Kocho and hot-headed fan-favorite Kyojuro Rengoku. The last card helps you fashion tiny accessories for your erasers! With that in mind, the kit lets you craft ten different erasers.

▼ You can make a Nichirin Blade, a butterfly, and an onigiri!

The process itself is simple in theory. Load up your preferred design card in the mold, and then it’s time to prepare the little rubber oblongs. Break them off and then set them in place. It’s finicky work, so the kit supplies a pair of tongs to ensure they’re perfectly positioned and to help avoid knocking over any pieces you’ve already laid down.

▼ You only need a small piece of this…

▼ There, now it’s in place!

Carefully arrange the blocks atop the design sheet until the character takes form. Tanjiro looks just like a sprite in a Game Boy game here.

▼ Pixel perfect!

Here, Saya notes that while the kit is targeted to kids aged eight years old and up, placing the little cubes can be very tricky**.** She assumes it might be too difficult for some young children, or too frustrating — a single slip will send the whole design into chaos, and you’ll have to be very patient to fix it.

Once all of the parts have been placed, close the mold around it and dunk it in water. Then it’s ready to go into the microwave.

▼ Ding, eraser’s done!

Take it out, and voila! The pieces bond together to form one solid eraser. Saya liked her new eraser far too much to ruin it by testing it out, but allegedly it works just like a regular eraser. Some of the rubber used in its construction is glow-in-the-dark, too, so this is one eraser you’ll never lose in your pencil case.

Tanjiro here is a square design, but you aren’t limited to those. If you’d rather create a jagged edge, the kit supplies extra cubes called “magic sticks” that ensconce your design but won’t stick when heated in the microwave. You can simply peel them away once it’s done cooking.

▼ Inosuke’s design is jagged, so out come the magic sticks.

▼ Now he’s set, and the magic sticks are taken away.

But you know, he just isn’t Inosuke without his mask…

▼ Ta-dah! The eraser sleeve provided goes right over his head.

Saya noticed with regret that the base designs for the cast only included the most famous characters shown in the anime, meaning her favorite manga-only Pillars, demons, or any characters that debuted in the box office smash-hit movie are missing. This is where the kit really shines, though, because Saya had plenty of extra materials to make her very own interpretation of a certain, incredibly popular character. All she had to do was use Inosuke’s base and improvise a little.

▼ Everyone’s favorite antagonist…

▼ Muzan Kibutsuji!

After she was done playing around with erasers, Saya noticed that there was actually room in the mold for larger designs than the 10×10 square provided by the design cards. She imagined you could make designs up to 13×13, and there are also generic design sheets you can look up online to help you make even bigger designs by constructing small parts and then linking them together.

▼ Saya made her own design for Obanai Iguro, too.

The only problem came with characters that were far outside the provided palette, like Mitsuri Kanroji, whose hair is a bright lime and cherry-blossom pink.

💚 todays green anime girl of the day is mitsuri kanroji from demon slayer: kimetsu no yaiba! 💚 pic.twitter.com/fytjJyogKC

— green anime girl of the day ! (@greenanimegirls) November 8, 2020

If you’re desperate enough, though, you can always purchase additional Orikeshi sets from Bandai to compensate for the colors you lack. They even sell pastel colors.

By the way… Saya decided that the void left in her heart by the Aqua Beads couldn’t be filled by just one craft project, so she bought two.

▼ Introducing the Demon Slayer version of Can Badge Good!, priced 5,720 yen!

Can Badge Good! is another Bandai kit that lets you make your own big, glossy badges to pin to your backpack, stick on a corkboard or slap on a jacket lapel. Just sandwich one of the 15 designs between an aluminum backing and a glossy holographic screen, set it against a badge packing and then scrunch it in the machine.

▼ Into the press they go!

Saya was so delighted by the finished product that she couldn’t help but wonder, are these kits really meant for kids? You can even print your own designs to use in the machine, to produce your own custom badges and keychains as you see fit.

No matter how modern toys might get, there’s no beating the simple joy of crafting something for yourself…especially if whatever you craft is a character from your favorite anime. If you’re stuck for Christmas gifts and see an eraser kit or badge-making kit for sale, take a chance on it! It’s a much more affordable option than some other Demon Slayer gifts we could name.

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