Deco Mandala Designer

I was offered this fun toy to review through the Amazon Vine program. Every once in a while, I hit the jackpot and get offered something truly fun like this. I also get a lot of books to review and have found that my library trips have decreased significantly over the last few years since I've been doing this. I've also read a lot of lousy books but many good ones as well!

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This product is for kids 6-12. Well I'm a lot older than 12, yet I had a very fun time using it while watching TV last night. I was offered this product for review, but wasn't quite sure what it would do, but as I'm seriously into crafting I wanted to try it. Apparently there are more stencils that are available separately, but the ones included here were pretty much girly ones and since the designer itself comes in bold pink I would assume that it is meant for girls. Boys I think would also enjoy this in a different color and with more 'boy' type stencils.

I did post a picture of my first attempt at using the machine. There are all sorts of designs that you can make. It comes with one black fine point pen. I think a variety of other colors would have been great to include with the machine. I had some Sharpie fine point markers here at home and I used those for different colors and they worked very well in the stencils but any pen point much larger probably won’t work. You can however draw the designs with the black pen and then color them in when you take your paper out of the designer. If you didn't want to make designs in the circular format, you can also use the stencils on a flat surface. I'm thinking up ways that I can use this machine in my own crafting and quilting.

They didn't make these sorts of toys when I was a child and I can see where I missed out on some fun. Everything seems very well made, including the butterfly 3-D punch. The ink stamp took very little pressure for the stamp to work. Instructions came in German, French and English. It did need 4 AA batteries to work to turn the circle and there were no glitches at all and everything moved smoothly. I can see where those who are heavily into scrap booking would also like making designs on this machine to add to their scrapbook pages.

All in all a very fine toy that could be used in a car trip, in a hospital bed for a sick child (being sure to have extra pen colors, crayons and paper in a separate tote, the machine itself has carry handles), at a slumber party, and any time you have a girl that wants to be creative and artistic but doesn't yet have the fine motor control for drawing--something I still have problems with!