Toy Thinking

I took the piece of paper that the teacher had handed out to us, and looked at the figures on the paper in front of me. Curiosity was building up in me. I followed my finger around the wavy lines on the paper. The paper was white as snow, and soft as silk.

The teacher told us what we should do: Cut out the figures on the paper, and make your own toy.

I started cutting out the figures on the paper with a pair of scissors, the blade of the scissors scraping against the paper, making that scratchy, scraping sound. I started to wonder what toy would be fun to have. I thought from bouncy balls to soft toy animals.

My mind was drifting of until the teacher put on some music. I don’t remember what the song was called. But the song was slow, I think, and kind of sad maybe. I liked the song. Somehow it made me think of my friends in Sweden. They start school today, and that kind of made me a little sad. But I couldn’t think about that for too long, because I still hadn’t thought of what the toy should look like!

When I was done cutting the figures out, I put them together, first the classical way, as a bear. And even thought that might not be so creative, I still went ahead with it. I guess it’s more what it can do than what it looks like that is important (of course the look of it does help). I went to get the glue, and went back to my seat. I started gluing the toy together, and in the last minute, I changed the form from a bear to a mouse. With a hat. I went to get some coloured markers, and wanted something “funky” so I chose a dark version of shocking pink and grape purple. The belly, paws, nose and ears became grape purple, and the rest became pink. The hat and bow tie became green. Together it might have looked a bit much, but it was supposed to be so. Funky.