FPO
Many famous artists have used their talents to
create toys and products just for kids. Surrealist
Salvador Dalí designed the colorful Chupa Chups
lollipop logo. Modern sculptor Alexander Calder
launched his career by creating an entire toy
circus from wire and wood, and he later designed
toddler pull-toys for Gould Manufacturing in the
1920s. Car designer Ed Roth and husband-and-
wife architect/designers Charles and Ray Eames
all created for kids.
But here are some fun “fakes” they didn’t
design. These plausible parodies never really
were, but what if … ?
Alexander Calder was trained as an engineer,
but loved art and created his own toys from a
young age. His unpretentious approach featured
common materials and improvised fabrications
using everyday items like wire, tubing, and
springs. He called his playful hanging sculptures
“mobiles,” which innovatively used color and
motion — and so does this magnetic spinning toy
(Figure
A
)!
To make this fun fake I hacked an existing
Whee-Lo toy and added my own bent coat hanger
wire handle in an elephant shape as a nod to
Calder’s own animal drawings and his famous
bent-wire Circus. I used a Glowforge laser cutter
to cut and engrave acrylic to add a “Calder”
signature logo badge that joins the new handle to
the old toy (Figure
B
).
Ed “Big Daddy” Roth was a mid-century maker
of all things monster. He introduced the iconic
iconoclast Ratfink, airbrushed monster T-shirts,
modernized the hot rod, and made millions of
monster/model car kits. Tolerated by moms
and loved by kids, Roth’s greatest creation was
probably his own over-the-top-hat counter-
culture character. This woodburning set could
have been a hot toy in its time — had it ever
existed (Figure
C
).
A flea-market-find vintage woodburning
kit provided the plug-in iron, instructions, and
colored hot foils. The Glowforge’s built-in camera
made quick work of burning the Roth artwork into
some sample wooden project panels. I even found
an old photo of Roth using a woodburner iron to
work on an acrylic bubble top car — the perfect
Making Fun
109
make.co
A
B
C
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