On the Mold-A-Rama Map! (Well, Almost)

Korinthian Violins is now the proud owner of our very own Mold-A-Rama machine!

Although, technically, that's not quite true because Mold-A-Rama is a trademarked term used by the Mold-A-Rama company which operates machines in the Midwest.  Machines not leased and maintained by that particular company tend to go under the name "Mold-A-Matic" (which is how most of the machines we saw on our Florida trip were labeled), but they are all vintage machines from the early 1960s.  They are hard-working antiques that still delight many.  They certainly delight us!

Our machine was salvaged from the group of neglected and damaged Mold-A-Matics that we encountered at the Knoxville Zoo.  I essentially said in my blog post about our Knoxville visit that this seemed to be where Mold-A-Ramas went to die.  If you'd asked me when I started blogging what I might achieve through this medium, getting the Mold-A-Rama machines replaced at the Knoxville Zoo would not have ever come to mind.  And yet, when people who care about these machines saw my post, wheels were set in motion to remedy the situation, and as a result I was offered the opportunity to buy one of the neglected machines "as is" at a steep discount.

How could I say no?

Well, any reasonable person could say no.  My husband could have easily said no.  But the poor man is married to me and OH MY GOD WE COULD HAVE OUR VERY OWN MOLD-A-RAMA MACHINE AND I WANT IT SO SO SO MUCH!!!! and he loves me and here we are and we have zero advertising budget now for the store from here until forever but I don't care.  We only have to sell about, I don't know, 2000 plastic figures to break even on the thing, but that could happen, right?  Sure.

In the meantime this is so cool.  We get to be on the Mold-A-Rama map!  Or the Mold-A-Matic map.  Or whatever. 

Mold-A-Ramas at the Knoxville Zoo

Our first stop on our big Mold-A-Rama Road Trip was the Knoxville Zoo in Knoxville Tennessee.  It was about 40 degrees and rainy there, but such a huge improvement over the below zero temperatures we'd been enduring in Milwaukee that it felt wonderful.  We liked Knoxville.

And we liked the Knoxville Zoo.  It's a small zoo for a small city, but it was nicely laid out with a decent number of animals including a few our zoo doesn't have, such as red pandas which were beyond adorable.  Instead of feeding the goats there you can brush them, which was sort of odd and hilarious.  Far and away the thing my kids loved best was the large netted habitat for budgies where you could go in and feed them seeds glued to sticks as the birds landed on you and flew all around.  That made my kids fans of that zoo forever.