Sunday, Apr. 30, 2023 - 7:42 a.m.

I started playing with E’s Spirograph yesterday and I’m newly intrigued. I never got into mine so much as a kid. It was too hard to get a good finished product where I didn’t slip off track, and I didn’t know what to do with them afterward, and of course I lost pieces of the kit.

Now I’m like, huh. This is kind of a really sophisticated tool that has a lot of ways you can go with it, and is more difficult and involves more precision to do it well than most people think. Endless combinations. Even the kid version is set up so you can make very precise work if you have the inclination.

E ended up asking me to please remember to ask first before I borrow his Spirograph. He hasn’t known what to do with it but I showed him and now he won’t let me play with it anymore.

So I discovered there’s this company called Wild Gears that makes these sets for adults, they’re precision crafted and modular and come in some really large sizes and lots of unusual shaped gears. A starter set is reasonable enough but you can easily get into the expansions and… Yeah. We all know how that works.

I wish I could tell if this is a craft-of-the-moment thing or one that I’d return to with any regularity. Of course, I tend to cycle back around to everything eventually.

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