Spinning Plates

Me & Dad! Note the rainbow sleeves on my shirt…

My dad is an architect and was the design partner in his firm when I was growing up. Occasionally, I would go to work with him on early release days or days off of school. I remember playing in the back of his office with all the tile samples and giant sets of prismacolor markers. I would build little worlds on the shelves where they kept office supplies. There were walls covered in tile and counter samples, and binders full of carpet and fabric swatches. I was a kid in a candy store. 

One of my favorite things to do was play with the electric erasers. I realized that if you turned them up so the eraser was pointing up, the clean white eraser became a little potting wheel that I could use to make miniature dishes. I would carve out little bowls, plates and cups with exacto knives and then color them in with the markers while the makeshift electric potters wheel was still spinning. It was always so much fun… until I got caught chopping the clean new erasers up into little bits by someone in the office. It was harmless fun, but from what I remember they weren’t too pleased with my creative waste of supplies, lol. It is fun to think that those little eraser dishes were my first taste of product design!

Electric eraser, in case you aren’t familiar.

Modern studio reproduction of a tiny plate and bowl.