Rainbow Loom

Pick your colors, grab the hook and start weaving. Rainbow Loom turned tiny rubber bands into a huge creative craze.

Pick your colors, stretch the tiny rubber bands over the pegs, hook one through another and keep going. Before long you've made a bracelet. Or a ring. Or a necklace. And then somebody shows you a pattern that's much more complicated than anything you've figured out on your own.

Rainbow Loom took off in the early 2010s and transformed little colored rubber bands into a huge crafting craze. The loom itself is simple - basically a plastic board covered with rows of pegs - along with a small hook used to weave the bands together.

One of the things that helped Rainbow Loom spread in popularity was that kids could teach other kids how to make things. Patterns and instructional videos appeared online showing increasingly elaborate designs - fishtails, stars, flowers, characters and creations that went way beyond an ordinary rubber-band bracelet.

And unlike a lot of electronic toy crazes, you could carry a handful of rubber bands with you almost anywhere. You could make bracelets with friends, trade them, give them away, compare patterns and then go looking for another bag of colors (because somehow you never had enough of the one color you wanted).