even*cleveland: gifts for wildly creative ten-year-old goofballs

gifts for wildly creative ten-year-old goofballs

For medievalists/miniaturists: a decorate-your-own castle blank, complete with inspiration, craft glue, and an assortment of craft paints and popsicle sticks (old egg cartons make especially good masonry). Add a working catapult kit for siege warfare re-enactments.

For painters: Akashiya watercolor brushes and a big ol' New SoHo SKETCH pad.

For creative writers: A fuzzy one-eyed creature journal, complete with padlock, for monstrously good drafts.

For sculptors: Wikki Stix (a magical melding of yarn and wax) to doodle in three dimensions.

For activists: The Pushcart War by Jean Merrill, which reveals (hilariously and metafictionally) words to live by —"don't be a truck"—and what it really takes to change the world.

For collectors: An earmarked ten-spot tucked inside a coin purse for treasure-seeking expeditions, jaunts to the candy shop, or bookstore adventures.

For snackers: Extremely good cocoa, fluffy marshmallows, a whole can of real whipped cream, and Dutch chocolate sprinkles, for the ultimate hot chocolate.

For composers: A pocket-sized Stylophone synthesizer for sonic noodling.

For the late-night button-pusher: A Snoopy Timex, complete with stopwatch and backlight.

For cuddlers: Fuzzy slippers with kitten ears in pink or brown.

For the hoarder of Jellycats: A Raindrop.

For all: Kiosk's "noisemaker from hell", because the holidays come but once a year (and because, despite its fearsome appearance, it only makes a subdued squeak, haha).

What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose-knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful, that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art. The main requisite, I think, on reading my old volumes, is not to play the part of a censor, but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever; since I was curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard, and found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time.

V. Woolf

Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful for me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.

Italo Calvino

Why didn't she try collecting something? It didn't matter what. She would find it gave an interest to life, and there was no end to the little curiosities one could easily pick up.

Henry James

gifts for wildly creative ten-year-old goofballs

contact

elsewhere

Labels