Sam and the Firefly pencil

 Sam and the Firefly is one of Jack's favorite books.  He especially likes the page where the mischievous firefly writes over the hot dog man's sign to read "COLD Dogs".

I made this light up pencil for Jack before he entered first grade.  When he holds it correctly to write, the firefly's led blinks in different colors.  Of course, Jack had to have fun.  He immediately started making Pizza Hut signs, which he crossed out and changed to read "Pizza COLD". 



To begin, I used some wire to make an armature.  The firefly's arms and legs are quite thin.  As a bonus, they are now pose-able.   The wire is curled in not just to make hands and feet, but also to prevent injury by pokey wires.  I left some wire dangling from the bottom so I could hot glue or jam the wires into the pencil.  I didn't really have a plan.  :)  Then I wrapped the armature in tinfoil strips to reduce the amount of polymer clay needed for the sculpture.

I mixed equal parts of blue and green Sculpey Bake and Bend polymer clay with a little black to get the face color, and I used black for his body and hands.  I conditioned the clay, rolled it flat, and wrapped the foil body with clay.  Next I added features like his black smile, two white oval eyes with two little circular pupils, black eyebrows, black hands and feet (why did I forget the feet?),and two rather stubby antenna.  The antenna did not have armature wires, so they needed to be stubby to stay on the sculpture.  They were necessary for expression.  I baked the sculpture according to the manufacturer instructions.   

For the electronics portion of this project, I took apart a light up rubber ducky which stopped blinking.  There were two touch points on the bottom of the duck, which I later extended with speaker wires so that when Jack holds the pen low near the tip, he is closing the circuit.  This duck's water tight design left me no way to change the batteries; an autopsy was my only recourse!  On the tray with the blue duck I gathered different large translucent marker caps.  I was trying to find a clear plastic container that I could turn into the led holder.  I could have used any one of them.  I settled on a plastic tube from a marble maze construction toy. 
I hot glued the whole thing together and taped the wires to the pencil.  Check out my YouTube video below for more info and to watch Jack writing with it.  It is a heavy pen, but I made it with stuff I found around the house.  If I were to redesign it, I think I would not use the plastic housing.  Perhaps I would bake a blinking led directly into the clay.