Plastic Priorities
(Kids • )
Up until yesterday, I thought Plastic of the Damned was most apt in describing credit cards.
Yeah, buddy, but now, in the midst of economic malaise, job pressures, news breaking around my shoulders, crime at the front door and farm chores out back, I have my head bent over the top of the washing machine doing Melty Beads.
What? You are unfamiliar with this pastime/commercial torture form? Melty Beads are in point of fact tiny, short plastic tubes of various colors. They come with plastic templates, for want of a better word, shaped as little cubes or circles or stars or triangles, and covered in rows of little plastic nubs just big enough to hold one Melty Bead. You make designs on the templates. Little booklets come with the set, showing just where to put the dark pink, light pink, white and green beads in order to make the finished product of your heart’s desire.
My little girl does Melty Beads. They are a challenge for her 5-year-old fingers, and when she finishes one, she triumphantly shows it all around, then places it on top of the closed lid on the washing machine, where mom covers it with a special Melty Bead cloth of some kind and irons it lightly. This application of heat melts the Melty Beads together, hence the name.
Hence yesterday afternoon’s 40-minute torment.
It turns out if mom forgets there’s an unmelted Melty Bead creation on the washing machine, placed there gently after the last one was inadvertently dropped and tearfully exploded across the floor, and then dad decides to drop a heaping load of clothes in the washer and flips the lid up with one hand while holding said load in the other arm…
It turns out in that case I have no choice but to take a pair of tweezers and spend 40 minutes retrieving every last damn bead and placing each quivering one on a template with pegs so small I can barely see ‘em, after having sifted through reams of Melty Bead booklets to find the design Em had created so I can do it all over again with my fat fingers.
→ B.Dunn, May 21, 2009, 06 07 am
