Fashion Designer

Comments about Fashion Designer:

I think it's a unique product, lots of different designs to make, along with texture. My 4 year old daughter loves it. Just wish it came with more crayon colors. Also, you can use any kind of paper.

Comments about Fashion Designer:

I bought this one for my four-year-old daughter for Christmas. She loves the idea of the product, but I find in execution it has several weaknesses.

1. Weak selection of fashions. My daughter's preference (and I can't imagine she's alone here) is for creating big, fancy ball gowns. This set includes only perhaps three long dress options and too many casual/sport options (running shorts, plain long paints, and something I can describe only as 'fringed bermuda shorts,' to name some of them.) Her interest in these plain, 80's style casual items is nil.

2. Bizarre body proportions. Perhaps as in real life, the models are too skinny.

3. Too much skin! Too many bare midriffs, micro-minis, etc. In addition to the message it sends to young girls, this limits the amount of fabric in an outfit and thus the color/texture choices available to the young designer. For this type of a product, more fabric is better!

4. The enclosed "rubbing crayons" used to generate the drawings are red and yellow (despite the package illustrations showing outlines in black.) Yellow can barely be seen on white paper and red is far from 'neutral.' We used a medium-thickness black crayon but it leaves smudges throughout the drawing and we are looking for other options.

4. Limited plate use. Because of the storage nook for the pencils (see below), the texture plates can only be put in the holder in one order. This limits the range of textures available for various articles of clothing -- although to be fair you *could* put the dress drawing in upside down, but that requirement creates an extra layer of frustration for the youngest users.

5. The enclosed colored pencils are all but useless. We had much better luck using crayons to get the textures (and my personal 4-year-old designer especially liked the results she got from using Colorations glitter crayons.)

Overall, I'm really disappointed. My daughter likes the idea but after she uses the three fancy tops (I mean, how much fun is a polo shirt?) and three poofy skirts a dozen times, I'm afraid she's going to lose interest. I had higher hopes for this toy.

Comments about Fashion Designer:

This is a pretty good toy...I think it doesn't work very well with the colored pencils...the crayons make a better impression, but it's easy to use those up quickly, and then where do you get replacements? It's still fun to make the various combinations, but it works best when the paper fits exactly inside the holder, which means every piece needs to be cut to size. Overall, it's fun, but not my daughter's absolutely favorite toy (got it for her last year when she turned 4)

Comments about Fashion Designer:

This is a great toy that my daughter just loves. She really enjoys selecting the design and colors then creating the art all by herself. The end products are beautiful!

Comments about Fashion Designer:

Fun and simple to use. No artistic apptitude required. Allows young children to explore their imaginations and create lots of different designs.

Comments about Fashion Designer:

We're very pleased with this, my daughter plays with it all the time. Great imagination booster. So good to find a positive toy for girls!!

Comments about Fashion Designer:

Gave it to my 6 year old for her birthday. We found the color holder irritating and did not really want to use the yellow and red colors. The texture plates were hard to realign with the sketches and to use different colors. She has not played with it since.