Colorforms

My first Colorforms kit showed up when I was four or five years old, and I fell for it completely. The pieces were reusable, and the sets were affordable, which mattered a lot in a house where new toys could be kind of rare. This was years before computers and electronics filled every room, so a bag of sticky vinyl shapes felt like something close to magic to me. Of course at the time I never thought much about where they came from, and I decided to dive into their history.Colorforms began as a bathroom remodel that got out of hand. Harry and Patricia Kislevitz met as art students, and in 1951 they were looking for a way to fix up their bathroom walls without paying for real paint. Several accounts place that bathroom in River Edge, New Jersey, instead of Manhattan. Always happy to see a NJ connection for things I like. A friend who worked with vinyl for pocketbooks gave the couple a few rolls of the thin colored material, and they discovered it stuck to glossy paint without any glue…