Egg-Carton Zoo II
Haas, Blohm & Blohm
1989
Submitter: Our district, a medium sized public library, haw been doing some pretty heavy weeding and one of the places I’ve been working has been the Juvenile 700’s. When I first saw this, I thought how long has this been hiding here? I thought for sure it was made in the late 60’s or 70’s. I wondered if we had at one time owned Egg-Carton Zoo I. I wanted to go find an egg carton, but realized that I didn’t have a Styrofoam carton at home. Are eggs still packaged in Styrofoam?
The book is set up to give you “facts” about each animal, a sample of what you could draw on the egg carton, and a finished animal. There are no templates and the author encourages you to manipulate the egg carton to find the hidden animals. The last sentence on pg 8 says it all. I think this would be rather hard for youngsters to create similar animals. The author also encourages the would be artists to raid the spice cabinet, specially mentioned is the saffron. I don’t know how many people actually still have saffron in the cabinet and if they did there might be some outraged cooks if kids used it to color an egg-carton fish. I’m not sure this book was actually written for kids and should probably have been originally cataloged in the adult collection. It’s only circulated a dozen times and it’s been 5 years since the last.
Holly: I would KILL a kid for using saffron in a craft project. It’s anywhere from $6.50 to $8.50 or more per GRAM! It’s a cute idea for a book, but it does seem like it could use more instructions. Maybe it’s just supposed to be inspirational and not a how-to book, but the end results are much more sophisticated than your average 10-year-old can pull off. Give a kid a chance! These and these are more do-able. Googly eyes are acceptable supplies. But saffron??
Yes, eggs do still come in styrofoam, at least they do in the Mid-Atlantic region. Although, it is usually the standard, old school, grocery store brand. Anything free range or organic tends to come in cardboard.
Ha ha I looked through the first book a few years ago! Our central library is the “repository” for last items in the system — at least, it was — I think they removed quite a bit with their current renovations. I remember thinking at the time that this was really cool, but completely ridiculous as a plan for kids!
Depending on source and brand, you still can get styrofoam cartons, but I remember cardboard still being more common back in the 80s. (Walgreen’s are foam and I think Eggland’s Best are too.)
I used to do all sorts of crafts with styrofoam in elementary school, but I’m old! I’m sure that you could get it at the craft store back in the day as well, but no more.
Nobody should be using saffron for craft projects!
I am in San Diego and eggs still come in Styrofoam here. I would not bother with any of these.
Maybe saffron wasn’t so expensive then.
Saffron has always been expensive!
There’s this one brand of eggs at the local grocery store that come in Styrofoam. I’m actually thinking of attempting to make the hippo. It will be saffron-free. Until now I thought that was just a name for a type of scarf or blanket and not a spice. And shoe polish sounds even worse!
McDonald’s fries at the bottom of the sea!