Of course the Etch-A-Sketch wasn't the only drawing toy that I had. There was also the Spirograph. This was a set of plastic wheels of varying sizes with varying numbers of cogs around the rim and a number of holes just big enough to poke the point of a pen through. You pinned one or more of them to your paper and rotated others around them by pushing with a coloured pen. They produced a dazzling array - or, as it said on the box "a million marvellous patterns" - of designs and by combining them and using a variety of colours you could make...
...well you could make a lot of essentially very similar patterns.
Like many things from our childhoods it's quite hard to see why they had such appeal but it's unquestionable that they did. I filled books with them - not to mention bits of the wall, white tablecloths and assorted bed linen. Felt tip pens were best. They were just the right size to go through the holes, came in a gazillion different colours, required no pressure , would write on anything and, unlike pencils, didn't go blunt or break.
The Spirograph lacked Etch-A-Sketch's ability to produce a proper picture that was actually of something but it more than made up for it in so many other ways. First of all it always produced something that was appealing to the eye, something that wasn't a rubbishy sketch but rather a fully formed, brightly coloured, pretty pattern. Of course the patterns were permanent - or at least, in the case of the sheets and table cloths, permanent until the next weekly wash. They could be stuck to the wall and kept. Best of all it required no ability beyond the ability to stick a pin through a hole and then rotate one bit of plastic around another bit of plastic.
It was marvellous, it was wondrous, it was endlessly fascinating. But why? Probably because everything is when you're six.
...well you could make a lot of essentially very similar patterns.
Like many things from our childhoods it's quite hard to see why they had such appeal but it's unquestionable that they did. I filled books with them - not to mention bits of the wall, white tablecloths and assorted bed linen. Felt tip pens were best. They were just the right size to go through the holes, came in a gazillion different colours, required no pressure , would write on anything and, unlike pencils, didn't go blunt or break.
The Spirograph lacked Etch-A-Sketch's ability to produce a proper picture that was actually of something but it more than made up for it in so many other ways. First of all it always produced something that was appealing to the eye, something that wasn't a rubbishy sketch but rather a fully formed, brightly coloured, pretty pattern. Of course the patterns were permanent - or at least, in the case of the sheets and table cloths, permanent until the next weekly wash. They could be stuck to the wall and kept. Best of all it required no ability beyond the ability to stick a pin through a hole and then rotate one bit of plastic around another bit of plastic.
It was marvellous, it was wondrous, it was endlessly fascinating. But why? Probably because everything is when you're six.
No comments:
Post a Comment