Photo Finish 35: Ode to School Supplies

pencil crayon, ruler, chalkboard love

I love school supplies. Love love love. Love. Blank paper, sharpened pencils, unused erasers. I’m a pen and paper girl at heart. If I could hand-write my blog posts, paste the actual photos onto them and mail them to you via snail-mail I would do it in a heartbeat. So in honour of back-to-school season, this post is dedicated to some of my favourite school-related items, and my school-related history with them.

Pencil Crayons

When I was little one of my favourite things to do was colouring. I loved choosing a different colour for each space, sharpening my pencil crayons when they got dull, staying in the lines. The best thing about geography class was colouring in the maps. Oh yeah, colouring totally appeals to a perfectionist child. When I grew up and had a little girl of my own I envisioned countless hours of colouring together in colouring books like I had with my mom.

Uh, not.

She was not a colourer. What? What the what? There are little girls who don’t colour? It’s true, you can all feel very sorry for me. Thanks. And now colouring books aren’t even cool anymore since apparently they stifle a child’s creativity. Well, I beg to differ on that one. If any of you have a child who needs a colouring partner you can send them to me, I’ll happily oblige.

Rulers

Straight lines. What’s not to love? When I was in elementary school I underlined everything I could…with a ruler. The date. My name. Titles (double line). Subtitles (single line). Plus…with a ruler you can measure the length of your lines to make sure they’re all the same. Bliss. Also, I colour-coded my underlining (see Pencil Crayons above) to co-ordinate with the days of the week, how awesome is that? I even used a ruler to draw the lines in my fractions for math.

Wow did I just write that out loud???

Well now you know and we never need to speak of it again. But I still say that straight lines of the same length, and colour-coding, are awesome.

Fun fact: early rulers were made out of ivory; later wood, metal and plastic; then lasers (not fun)

Chalkboards

Well, at least a large part of the world has gotten onto this bandwagon with me. Is there anything out there that hasn’t been painted with chalkboard paint by someone? I have a Pinterest board dedicated to chalkboards to verify this fact. Back to elementary school days…remember how there were classroom jobs we had to do? My absolute all-time favourite job was cleaning the chalkboards at the end of the day then cleaning the brushes against the brick walls outside. I might still love cleaning chalkboards. I might have quite a few chalkboards around the house, maybe even a whole chalkboard wall. I might make chalkboard paint labels and crafts. I might paint furniture with chalkboard paint. Or I might not.

Technically chalkboards are not a school supply.

There are probably very few classrooms with chalkboards in them anymore. Bulletin boards maybe. Whiteboards, smartboards, tablets. That’s what in the schools now. So chalkboards are charming and quaint and retro, and that’s fine by me. But that’s quite enough geekiness for one post. Even one blog. So I’ve gotten that out of my system…mostly…and we’ll move on next week.

Thanks for hanging in there with me. Did I “favourite” the school supplies you love? Is there anything you're crazy about to the point of geekiness? Tell me you're still my friend!!!