Genius Gift-Giver Made Pretend Instant Pots for Her Nieces

Here’s a sweet way to encourage cooking skills in any aspiring junior chefs you may know: Make an Instant Pot in which they pretend cook all their favorite recipes, both real and imagined! It’s like a play kitchen, but even better. The process of making these mini pots isn’t exactly simple, but it’s absolutely worth busting out your crafting skills for. And when it’s done you’ll be bringing a kid joy during the holidays. That’s reason enough to dust off the old glue gun right? Right. Here’s how you do it.

First, you need the template for the Instant Pot label. Elvira Garcia, who shared the finished pots, along with how-to instructions, in a Facebook Instant Pot Community page, generously provided a photo of the Instant Pot label she used for the toys in her post. Print the label on glossy or photo paper so it looks professional (you can also use regular paper and then laminate it). Then you’ll need an empty plastic coffee container, which will obviously serve as the body of your pot.

At a crafts shop like Michaels, you can find small wooden knobs to glue to the top of the lid so that it has a nifty handle (you should paint them black so that they match the rest of the pot; Elvira added a coat of glitter glue to make them look even prettier). Then you need to spray paint the canister silver to match the color of the real Instant Pot, glue on the label, and finally coat the whole thing in Modge Podge so that it looks shiny. It’s a process that will take time, but a gift made with this much care might even win over the staunchest kitchen skeptics.

Elvira’s holiday situation is incredibly relatable: She says that when she’s visiting her parents and “crises [sic] hits” she needs something to occupy herself, so she turns to crafting. This time, unfortunately, it’s that her father had heart surgery. Thus, these mini-Instant Pots were born. (The surgery went well by the way. Hooray!)

Elvira said she made these mini pots for her nieces so that “they can cook at the same time as their mom.” What a great way to encourage kids to to develop a healthy relationship to cooking (and understand the importance of the Instant Pot in our cultural landscape).