F is for Festive Eraser Fellows

We did actually see three of these last year, at this time, courtesy of Iwako via Paperchase, these however may be copies, but copying has moved ahead in leaps and bounds in recent years, and as a result the Chinese take-off's (currently in The Works) are almost impossible to tell apart from Iwako originals.

Still available in The Works, under an obvious phantom-brand; WonderWorks; itself slightly ironic as I only made the point we hadn't seen anything from them for a while the other day in response to their poor share performance in a News, Views . . . post! The individual figures seen a year ago were the snowman, Santa' and tree, although I know the deer is an Iwako design and presume the sleigh is a copy to?

The deer had been temporarily blinded in one eye by a careless assembler, when these start to come in, in mixed lots, in a few years I will restore his (or her...) sight with a spare pin! The tree is two different colours but not as contrasting as the Iwako original we saw last December.

The sum of the parts, the faces and buttons are all achieved with the small polyethylene or 'propylene 'pins' which are shoved into little holes. On some of the animals which came out first (over a decade ago now) the eye/button-pin goes right-through a tunnel and can be pushed through and removed, these are mostly blind-ended holes, so removal is harder.

The deer's antlers are also a different colour (which is meant to provide a contrasting nose) but like the tree the colours aren't as far-apart as Iwako's, and relatively unnoticeable.