Popular Toys of the 20th Century--My Entry in the May PCAGOE Challenge--Remember to Vote May 1-7

As soon as the PCAGOE Challenge Pool Photo for May is posted, I will blog about it here with all of the fabulous entries.  I decided to have fun with the theme which was "History", so I picked Popular Toys of the 20th Century as my theme and included Lincoln Logs, Crayons, Mr. Potato Head, Raggedy Ann, the Teddy Bear and the Slinky.  I can see why people get addicted to making miniatures.  It is fun but very challenging to make things on such a small scale--harder to perfect the details, but certainly fun and Worth the effort.  I think some of these toys do have possibilities down the road as earring charms.  They do have armatures so sturdiness shouldn't be a problem.  I wonder, how many people would wear Mr. Potato Head on their ears?  I can foresee that you might have to convince little children that this one wasn't meant to be taken apart!  I learned a lot from researching these toys.  Binney and Smith were the creators of the Crayola Crayons, which came out in 1903.  Somehow in my mind, I never thought about crayons having to be invented.  I just assumed they had always existed.  And Lincoln Logs were invented by the son of Frank Lloyd Wright!  The "Lincoln" in the name not only refers to Abraham Lincoln but also to Frank Lloyd Wright's original middle name, which was Lincoln.  Mr. Potato Head originally only included the body parts and you were supposed to put them on a real potato.  Slinky has been around since 1945 even though I never saw it until the 1960's.  There were certainly stuffed bears before the Teddy Bear, but the Teddy Bear was named after President Theodore Roosevelt after a hunting trip where the only bear they could find was a sick bear and the President refused to shoot it, which started a whole round of cartoons about the President and the bear.  The Teddy Bear was named after President Roosevelt not long after these events.  Raggedy Ann was invented by an American writer for his daughter, who later died from complications from a smallpox vaccination and the doll then became a symbol of the anti-vaccination movement of those times.  It is just amazing to learn all of these little known facts about the history of toys!