Today, on a candy run at CVS, Caleb convinced me to buy him some Blendy Pens. The kids have seen these on TV and have been begging me for them for weeks, so I finally gave in.

We got a pack of 12 pens, 6 fusion chambers, 8 surprise textured art pictures and 25+ surprise art stickers for $9.99.

As soon as we got home the kids tore in to the box. Skyler read the directions and they began to blend.

I checked on them a while later to see how it was going. I found Caleb using one pen to color on the tip of another pen. I said, “What are you doing?” Apparently they couldn’t get the pens to blend in the provided blending chambers so he was taking matters in to his own hands.

I read the directions and discovered the kids weren’t holding the pens in the vertical position. Once we started doing that we finally got some blending.

You are supposed to put a pen in to each of the ends of the chamber until you hear each of them click. Then you hold the pens vertically while twisting the top pen one way and the bottom pen the other way for at least 5 seconds. The bottom pen will then be blended and you can color with it. The longer you twist the more blended color you’ll have.

The box says Blendy Pens are for ages 6+, but even Skyler & Spencer [who will be 8 in less than a month] were having some trouble. Honestly, even I had a bit of trouble. It’s hard to twist the pens. My hands hurt after a few minutes.

Included in the box were some textured pictures to color. Now that was pretty cool. The kids didn’t use much blended color on them, but they did like the look of the textures with the solid colors.

When I was a kid we did this on our own by pushing the tips of two markers together and twisting. So I’m not sure Blendy Pens are worth $10 when you can buy a package of markers for 99 cents. But, then again, we usually do pay more for convenience and using the fusion chambers does give you that blended effect without ruining the tip of the marker. Plus we got the textured pictures and stickers.