About them: MindWare is the award-winning creator, manufacturer and distributor of Brainy Toys for Kids of All Ages. Founded in 1990, the company started out with a small retail store in Minneapolis, evolving into a direct-to-consumer catalog and website business, as well as a wholesale business. Our diverse product line includes educational toys, games, brainteasers, creative play activities, building sets, coloring books and more. Over the years, our toys and games have won many prestigious awards from Mensa Select, Good Housekeeping, Parents’ Choice and the Spiel des Jahres in Germany. In 2013, MindWare was acquired by Oriental Trading Company and became a Berkshire Hathaway company. In 2016 the companies launched a Global Cart shopping function, allowing users to access more than 50,000 educational, engaging and entertaining products, and creating a one stop shop for party planning and gift giving.
My daughter and I love to craft so we were really excited when we got to pick a few products from the MindWare collection for us to enjoy together for Mother’s Day. Probably the hardest part was narrowing down our choices. They have a wide selection of games and activities for all ages. We ended up choosing their Pottery Wheel for Beginners and a Paint Your Own Stepping Stone Butterfly. We are actually planning to spend a few hours on Mother’s Day doing both activities to make it a joint project that we can enjoy together. Then we will have the memories of making them as well as the finished projects for years to come. We did open up the Pottery Wheel set already and check it out to make sure we didn’t need any additional supplies. It actually comes with everything you need since it works via an AC adapter and not with batteries. It comes with all of the necessary tools for making your own ceramic pottery as well as the paints to make it beautiful after it’s dried. We actually did decide to pick up some extra clay as it only includes 2.5lbs and we wanted to make sure we had enough just in case we had any accidents. Don’t want anything to spoil our Mother’s Day bonding time.
The Paint Your Own Stepping Stone Butterfly comes with 12 paints and a brush to paint with. It’s actually a fairly basic kit and besides painting it the only other work is baking it to set the paint to make it weather-resistant. We’ve actually already sat down and planned out what parts will be what color using the included design guide. We even divided up areas of the butterfly for each of us to paint. We are going to take turns painting the butterfly while the other person is working with the pottery wheel.
Probably my favorite part of these projects from MindWare is that in the end I will have beautiful works of art that my daughter and I made together. And things we can actually put to use instead of sitting on a shelf collecting dust.
The products in this post were received complimentary to share my honest and unbiased opinions, which may differ from yours. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I used personally, and believe would be a good fit for consumers.