Invention and Imitation and a Dice Game—It's All Art

I made up this dice game when my kids were elementary-school age and we were homeschooling and I wanted a way for them to practice their multiplication that was more interesting than flash cards. Wouldn't it be swell if I could find a game that used multiplication in scoring?, I thought.

Well, I couldn't find one, so I made one up. I don't recall that we actually used it all that much. Kids don't always feel the same enthusiasm for our brilliant ideas as we do.

Years later, I thought this would be a good product to market to homeschoolers and other parents and teachers, so I designed a little booklet of instructions, bought dice through various educational supply sources, got some round tins from the Ax Man surplus shop in St. Paul, collaged the covers of the tins, and sold them at a homeschooling conference and then on Etsy.

With limited success. But just when I think maybe I won't bother with these anymore, someone buys one, or a few, and tells me how much they like it, and I decide to keep making them.

A third-grade teacher who bought one at a craft show later told me how well it kept a bright student occupied. A person who bought one from my Etsy shop said, "It's a fun game to work the brain." Another said, "Great for my third grader!" And this: "Great for all of us—kids and adults—in the car at first but they ask to play it at home now as well."

These little tidbits of encouragement have kept me making the games, even though they're not exactly a best-seller for me.

As my first few batches of games sold, I was scrounging for tins of various sorts to contain them, and eventually decided to buy the tins wholesale to be assured of a ready supply. Still, I was covering each one with unique ephemera from vintage bingo sheets, maps, and math books, always buffing the metal lids with sandpaper to make the glue adhere, then burnishing them to get rid of any bubbles, and glueing a label on each that coordinated with the colors on the paper. After that glue had dried, I then brushed on a sealant and left them to set overnight.

I knew I couldn't really expect to ask as much money for these as the time and thought I put into each individual game (searching for images, tracing and cutting and glueing, etc.), so I tried designing a standard cover for the tins to print out on sticker paper.

I didn't like the design I came up with, so I went back to crafting them one by one. (I disliked the design so much I can't even find an example to show you.)

Then I had a customer want six of the games for her son's birthday party. When I asked her if she had any preference as to the design on the tins, she replied "Math symbols, please."

And that made me recall a recent cover of Conduit magazine featuring chalkboard math symbols in the background.

And that made me think of a book I read earlier this summer, Steal Like an Artist, by Austin Kleon (which I bought at my local independent bookstore, Moon Palace Books), which pointed out that all artists get their ideas from somewhere, and we shouldn't be afraid to imitate and adapt ideas we come across, because those artists stole ideas and motifs from someone else.

Or, as my art buddy Brian Western once reminded me, "There is nothing new under the sun."

So I designed new covers for the dice games, featuring numbers and equations in a white chalkboard font on a variety of colored backgrounds, and I printed them on sticker paper, which means I don't have to buff, glue and burnish them anymore.

The customer was pleased. And so am I.

You can find these games in my Etsy shop, btw.

Stuff! Or a treasure box by any other name

When my kids were school age and I was looking for ways to practice basic math operations, I modified the rules for scoring rummy, counting each card at face value, with Jack=11, Queen=12, and King=13, so that we got lots of adding practice. But when it came to learning multiplication, I was stumped. I tried to think of an alternative way of scoring some familiar game and came up blank, so I made up my own game using dice and dubbed it Roll 100 (making the goal to get a score close to 100 through a combination of multiplication and addition).

The current version of my dice game.

Some years later, when I started getting into crafting, I thought I'd have a go at selling these games, putting them in assorted repurposed candy tins and setting them out on a table at the first Barton School Arts from the Heart craft fair one winter.

They sold reasonably well, but they attracted the most attention from kids too young to do the math. It was apparent that the colorful dice in a small tin held a certain allure apart from whatever function I had intended for them. I recall one mom buying one for her preschooler after he could not be persuaded to select something more age appropriate.

Which led me to the idea to put an assortment of dice and random objects in little tins for small children to do whatever they like with them. Not sure what to name my new product, I recalled a coloring book that artist Tom Cassidy made for his son, which he named Yikes! Stuff Everywhere; and so named my little tin of objects Stuff!





I see them as a kind of loose assemblage for kids, a random assortment of kid-pleasing objects, like buttons and old keys, game tokens and flat marbles. I looked for things to put in the Stuff! tins at estate sales and garage sales, and then started adding some new items, like tiny rubber animals made by Safari Ltd.

I enjoy collecting these various small items for the tins, it gives me an excuse to do something I am inclined to do anyway.

Stuff!

Creating original collages for the lids of the tins is the obviously arty part of the process, but so is the selecting of items to put in them; and fitting as many as I can while still making it possible to close the lid involves some creativity as well as spatial skills.

Some people ask me about the boxes and their purpose, although most don't need to be told; they understand them intuitively. So, while I sometimes struggle to "explain" them to folks who don't really get the concept, I have also discovered that the ones who do get it offer helpful descriptions I could use, calling them treasure boxes, for example.

A treasure box full of stuff everywhere. That pretty much sums it up.