I mentioned in my first post of the year that I have grown a bit obsessed with Kaleidoscopes. Aside from loving owning one and using it to help calm my anxiety, I have fallen in love with the theory and artistry and history around them. I have all sorts of thoughts swirling in my head about them and I am wondering if there might be a play waiting to be chipped away in all those thoughts. That’s something I may explore this summer, but in the meantime I wanted to share a little more background about how this obsession began.

About a year ago I went up to Jerome for a retreat with my amazing mama friends. There, one of th mentor moms mentioned that her favorite store was a place called Nellie Bly which has a number of fun, quirky items but about half the store is dedicated to kaleidoscopes.

It was incredible to walk into that store and hear the people who work there coax us all into trying the various kaleidoscope that some of us were a bit shy to interact with at first. Yet minutes later all these moms were rediscovering some childlike joy as we watched explosions of color through a variety of beautifully crafted scopes.

We all talked about the shop the rest of retreat and I couldn’t get one very beautiful musical scope out of my head. It was far from the fanciest item in the shop, but it was much more than I thought I’d ever spend on a kaleidoscope, but I loved that it was like a combination of kaleidoscope and music box, and I particularly loved that the way this scope works is that little trinkets and objects are put in a mirrored bottom of the scope and can be swapped out. It made me think of how to create different images and what else I might want to put in that space and see how it worked.

For a belated birthday gift last year I got to go back to Nellie Bly with the mentor mom in our group who first told me about the shop and the two of us got to make our own kaleidoscopes and learn all about the basics of the art and science behind them. I thought maybe this would satisfy my curiosity around it, but now I am even more curious and in awe. There were so many artists in town for this workshop weekend and I found myself curious about so many of these people and how many of the artists collaborate.

So that brings me to being in the very early stages of researching more and wondering if this is just a hobby for now or something I will mesh with another love of mine and perhaps make into a piece of theatre one day. In the meantime, I have a kaleidoscope kit I still want to make with my kids and am still often looking at my own precious kaleidoscope I bought over a year ago (and hoping to get better about actually switching out what goes into it as I have only done that a few times and eventually I’d like to swap it out monthly to go with themes or holidays of a given month!)

In the meantime, if YOU haven’t looked at a kaleidoscope recently I highly suggest even buying a super cheap one online and giving yourself some childlike wimsy!