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 - it's basically a plastic board covered with rows of pegs - 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 online instructional videos showed how to create elaborate designs yourself - things like fishtails, stars, flowers, characters, and creations that went way beyond an ordinary rubber-band bracelet.

The Rainbow Loom bracelets were quite the rage at the elementary schools in my area. It seems like every day my kids would come home with either a new one that someone had made, or that they had traded one of their old ones for.

Unlike a lot of electronic toy crazes, with Rainbow Loom you could just carry a handful of rubber bands with you almost anywhere and make bracelets with friends, trade them, or give them away.