Fun with craft store impulse buys!

I get an hour for lunch every day. I usually spend it at the large shopping center directly across the road from my office with my friend Kat from KatsAnimeHats.com. Since it only takes a half hour to get over there and eat, we usually have some extra time to kill, and because she’s always making hats or some other such thing, we spend a lot of time at the Jo-Ann Fabric. She’s even the mayor on FourSquare we’re there so often. Now I don’t have any real artistic talent at all, so I’m just along for the ride, literally. But I noticed something on our last trip. As you are herded through to the registers, they have several racks of impulse craft buys that are strategically placed at kid eye level, all for $1. Since most kids dragged to craft store probably don’t want to be there, if they make enough of a fuss, they should be able to leave with at least something. So I decided to pick some up that fit the general theme here at InsufficientScotty to see just how much fun you can have at the craft store with the stuff your mother would buy you for a dollar to keep you from causing a scene in public.

So what did I get? I picked up four different ‘activity’ books, two each for Batman and Spider-Man. The smaller ones even come with stickers! Whoo boy! We’ll check in on those another day, but today I wanna focus on the rest of my purchase. I picked up two sets of velvet art posters, one Spider-Man, and one Avengers. I also picked up a set of Avengers themed markers. And it’s a good thing I did. The posters come with tiny little markers, which I’m sure a kid could navigate, but I certainly couldn’t with my adult sized hands. Also, while the one set of posters included one of the Hulk, you can see the five colors of markers they gave me were red, green, yellow, blue, and black. No purple marker? What color am I supposed to make his pants? I suppose I could make him the Red Hulk and have him wear blue pants, but that just seems wrong. And a black marker? What am I supposed to do with a black marker on a velvet poster? Or why would I need a blue marker for either Iron Man or the Hulk?

Now as I’ve said, I have no artistic talent, and these things only cost a dollar each. Both really showed when I went to color them in. Doing all four of these took me at least an hour, if not two. The Hulk wasn’t so bad, because he was just two colors and wasn’t so intricately detailed. But the two Spider-Mans? They were a bitch! You can’t color in a velvet poster like you can in a coloring book, going over the lines. You need to color in each little section individually. Because these are dirt cheap Chinese productions, if you tried to color over the velvet lines, the velvet came off, and you lost the sense of depth. And if you got too close the the lines, the velvet absorbed the ink from the marker. All around, I did not expect simply coloring in a poster to be such a taxing ordeal. But, when I finished them all and framed them, I think they still look pretty swanky, don’t you?

Total cost? $6. Posters were $2, frames were $4.

This is just the beginning. Stay tuned for more checkins as I make my way though the activity books. I also picked up an Avengers paint by number, which based on how hard this was, I am not looking forward to at all.

JohnScott is the proud owner of a life size replica Captain Kirk Chair. He is a hoarder of Comic Books, Transformers, and Star Trek action figures. He attended Space Camp as an adult. He has taken vacations to the closing of the Star Trek Experience and the final night Shuttle launch. He has been known to yell at his television when the kids can't put together the damn statue in the Shrine of the Silver Monkey. When not writing for InsufficientScotty, he is a Software Engineer for a major healthcare communications company. You can Email or follow on Twitter @NotEnoughScotty or Facebook