Poetry Challenge #185-Color Our World
Crayola Crayons! Close your eyes, take a deep breath: Smell them?
My friends and I swore we could smell the difference between colors.* Remember breaking them? And/or trying to color so softly as to not break them? And when we did, which we always did, holding the broken ends together while gingerly easing the paper down to splint the break?
So many uses for broken crayons. Who knew? Thanks Little House Living!
The big boxes—48/64 pack came with built-in crayon sharpeners, but who had one of those? We sharpened ours the tried-and-true way, by angling the dull edge against the paper and shading while rotating until we had a nice point.
Turns out we have a pair of cousins Edwin Binney and C. Harold Smith to thank for Crayola Crayons. Their company manufactured that first boxed set of 8, which debuted in 1903. And Alice Stead Binney (Edwin’s wife) who combined the French words for chalk and oily (craie and oleaginous) to create “Crayola.”
“The crayons were sold for a nickel and the colors were black, brown, blue, red, purple, orange, yellow, and green. ”
Here’s more:
Crayon Trivia
Crayola makes over 3 billion crayons a year.
Crayola crayons come in 120 colors plus “specialty colors”
About 50 shades have been retired including Dandelion, Maize, Blizzard Blue, Fuchsia. Want to know all the colors Crayola Makes?
The world's largest crayon was made by Crayola. It was 15'6" and weighed 1,352 pounds.
Since 1903 Crayola has made over 237 billion crayons.
The newest Crayola creation came out in 2020. It’s a skin-tone box set of 32 called “Colors of the World.”
Poetry Challenge #185
Color Your World
Celebrate National Crayon Day by taking a deep breath back into your Crayola Crayon memory box, back to one specific day, place, time in your childhood. With that memory in mind and its specific shades and smells, write a poem about it. It might be a poem about crayons or coloring, but not necessarily.
Choose one color from the poem, or an overarching color for your poem—from a Crayola Crayon box or all your own—to serve as the title.
Open your Crayola Box; Take a Sniff . . .
Set Your Timer for 7 Minutes
Start Writing!
Don’t Think About it, just do it!
*Crayon smell truly is one of American adult’s most remembered childhood scents—and not only because I said so. Take a poll and see for yourself. Or take Bustle.com’s word for it.
Cindy Faughnan and I began this 7-Minute Poetry Challenge more than 1800 days ago! 185 weeks ago we began creating prompts to share with you. If you join us in the Challenge, let us know by posting the title, a note, or if you want, the whole poem in the comments.
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