Gearhead Mom

Friday, January 09, 2009

No Small Wonder

Posted by Missy W. @ 5:18 AM

Ed. Note: Here’s Jenna’s second post. Thanks, Jenna and feel free to stop by and post any old time!

Although not everyone in my house who would agree, my kids do not need any more toys. I suspected even they realized this when the pair of them—at the tender ages of 3 and 5—both put “a new toothbrush” (unprompted) on their respective Christmas lists. I mean, if that’s not scraping the bottom of the wish- bucket, I don’t know what is.

So it was with great trepidation that I eyed the poor mail carrier every day during the endless month of December as he struggled up the front path under a towering stack of boxes. Obviously, my children’s seven hundred aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins and a global smattering of honorary relatives were fully unaware of their severe lack of need—and our growing shortage of storage space. Toys R Us, indeed.

I had gently requested (not altogether accurate) early in the season, via mass email, that if any of our nearest did feel compelled to express their affection for my daughters with a physical token, that it pretty pretty please be a) small, b) educational, c) something I could re-gift or sell on eBay (ideally for a profit), or d) some combination of the above. Cash, I may have added in what I hoped was a subtle post script, was always welcome and no longer considered gauche.

Puzzles and picture books, baby dolls and bath robes, gadgets and games piled up with reckless abandon. A few of them got a little play before they were tossed into the sub-tree abyss, but for a while there was no clear stand-out.

And then we tore into the Shrink Art Jewelry Kit by Klutz. An updated take on the Shrinky Dinks my sister and I loved as a kid, this kit kept the kids (okay, and me—but it was by choice) busy for hours. 

The basic premise hasn’t changed: Draw or trace your design, color it in and cut it out, then pop it into the toaster oven. I was amazed at how painstakingly the girls crafted and decorated their designs on the wobbly plastic sheets, then how patiently they waited as I popped holes in them with the hole puncher. (It’s worth noting that if you skip this step, as I did once, you’ll be forced to drill the jewelry holes in it after the plastic hardens. This is not fun and is apt to leave small holes in your butcher block counter. Just saying.) It was hard to tell who got a greater kick out of the 60 seconds of curl-then-flatten magic that happened in the toaster; me or the kids. Oh my god, they look like Cheese Curls! They’ll never flatten out. Never. They’re ruined. These things su—Wait, look! They’re flattening! They’re FLAT! How awesome was that? Can we make another one? I am not making this up; these things are seriously cool.

Once your creations cool down—which takes all of about 30 seconds—you can commence with the bauble-making. The kit comes with beads, cords, clasps, earring wires—pretty much everything a budding designer needs to set up her own Etsy shop. Even my three-year-old made a damned decent ring that could easily sell for fifty bucks in Anthropologie, if I were the pushy sort of mom.
Trust me, if your jewelry box is clogged with hand-painted macaroni necklaces, you can’t get your hands on this nifty kit soon enough.

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