In considering what is and is not a "bad craft," for the most part I give a pass to any crafts that are geared towards small children. God's Eyes are terrible on several different levels, but if some kids have fun wrapping yarn around popsicle sticks, I'm all in favor of it. (It would be pretty hypocritical of me otherwise - I certainly perpetrated many bad crafts when I was a kid.)
But this business of the bead geckos is so puzzling, and it has spread beyond the realm of children's crafts, that I feel we need to address it.
If you have never seen one, these toy bead geckos are a few inches long, and are made with about 30 pony beads. You have an oval head, a larger oval for the body, four legs sticking out straight (with three beads at the end for the toes) and a long tail. The geckos look alarmingly flattened, as if they have been steamrollered in a Looney Toons cartoon. It is a disturbing artistic aesthetic.
The beads are strung together with cotton cord or wire, and the whole thing is completely useless. I don't say "useless" in the pejorative sense. It is a simple statement of fact. There is no purpose for a bead gecko, beyond the fact that it is a gecko made of beads. Every crafts fair has a table hawking bead geckos, and many a loving (and long-suffering) parent sports a bead gecko dangling from their keychain or rear view mirror.
My question is, why geckos? Why not cats, or horses, or poison dart frogs? What is it about the gecko specifically that has so captured the attention of the children's crafting world? Why are bead geckos a thing, and not bead dachshunds or bead airplanes or bead cupcakes?
Image courtesy Hubpages/Iceman1987
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