I went to a Kids’ Crafts Workshop (see – I told you I see a lot of kids’ crafts 🙂 with my kids this weekend. It was held at a craft store here, and it featured several different stations with a different product/activity at each station so the kids could get some hands-on experience. One of the stations featured Blendy Pens, and I have to admit that I’m baffled by the entire product. The basic premise is that you twist a double-tipped marker so that the two felt ends meet in the middle chamber, thus creating a marker that is now two colors instead of just one. Supposedly, twirls and swirls of color ensue when the marker is used on the paper.
Wrong.
It was difficult for little hands (and even my much bigger hands) to twist the pens to the point where the tips actually touched and blended the colors. Plus, what’s all the fuss about “blended” colors, anyway? Couldn’t kids get a similar effect just by using two different markers on the page? When you were in school, did you not try specifically to avoid letting your marker tips touch one another so that the pristine tips wouldn’t be sullied by a different color ink? (or was that just me? is that just one of my quirks? say it isn’t so…) I was completely unimpressed by the Blendy Pens. I’m betting they’re one of those ideas that sounded good on paper, but once they passed from theory into reality, it just didn’t hold up. Most importantly, my kids were unimpressed as well, so they get thumbs down from both mom and her child testers, who were bored and just looking out for the next activity.
I remember my daughter wanting to buy a generic brand of these pens at a local fair, we didn’t buy any but I did buy some online from ebay for 1/2 the price. She used them one or twice but then decided that blending pens didn’t actually do all those wonderful things, it was the lady who drew all those wonderful things.
Personally, I think these are better suited to older kids such as teens who need to work on creative titles for school projects etc.
