I have one here somewhere. It’s an off brand, but it’s still serviceable.
Art stuff like this is great to give a child when you want them to do something on their own that’s quiet and doesn’t involve batteries. In fact, art supplies and fun paper are my default birthday-party gift for kids when I (or the sprog) don’t know what they want or like. It’s also not something the birthday person is likely to get multiples of.
Glad to hear so many people fondly remember the spirograph. I will get a vintage one very soon for my cousin. I may even try it out first. 
good times
That was one of my favorite toys as a kid. So awesome! I’d like to get one again just because I remember having so much fun playing with them.
Loved Spirograph as a kid and I think today’s kids would too. Whether a child gravitates toward art, mathematics, engineering - great fun and creative stimulus.
I loved mine as a kid. My own kids are into everything artsy, so I’m sure they would love it too, if we had one.
I had a love/hate relationship with my Spirograph. I played with it all the time, yet I suspect that my success rate was somewhere around 33%. It seemed like all to often that I’d be almost done with the pattern, my hand would slip, and I’d wind up with a single errant pen-line completely ruining the geometry of the drawing.
But then I’d go right back to it the next day, after sulking for a while.
I could never get it to work for me. Too technical.
No, I’m not (entirely) kidding. I liked playing around with them, but somehow I could never get it exactly right like the pictures. Anything that wasn’t a perfect circle, I think.
-M.I.S!, born 1989
Me too. Using one of the holes near the perimeter of the “wheel” was always tough, and I always had extra difficulty with the one shaped like a “plus sign”.
My two cents: I enjoyed it occasionally as a kid, but that was before I had access to Xbox and the internet and cable TV (etc., etc.).
I loved my Spirograph. I put it on my Christmas list a few years ago but alas, discovered that they no longer make it like the old one.
I’d be interested in the Calculus of Spirograph.
What is that weird chewing/licking motion the first kid is making with his mouth? 
Another fan of the Spirograph checking in. I was a very art-oriented kid (I constantly told my long-suffering scientist parents that I wanted to grow up to be an artist). Sometimes it was difficult to make that thing work, but I enjoyed the challenge of creating a perfect pattern.
My “plus sign” wound up on the roof or down the toilet or something. I can’t remember for sure…
A lot of the more “technical” arts and crafts stuff that I used and loved were things that I used at someone else’s house, at school, or at places like the children’s science museum. In fact, one of the kids’ museums in the area had something similar, except it was essentially a pen on a string that’d use centrifugal energy to create the patterns-- it was a HUGE hit with my age cohort. For me, it was not having one at home that made it so darn nifty and fun to play with.
I agree with MsRobyn that arts and crafts stuff make great gifts for most kids; you do get the occasional kid who’s been so inundated with technological toys that they’ve already been trained out of the “this is cool!” phase of playing with mechanical stuff.
My daughter loves hers, and is actually a lot more creative with it than I was. I loved the math and the patterns, but didn’t really grok them, so was of the “stab and pray” random method.
She plans her designs and is rarely wrong about what will come out when she selects her pieces. That gives her a lot more creative control right there. But then she goes a step further than I ever thought of and draws little accessory stuff on her patterns, and suddenly there’s a bumblebee flying above four flowers growing near a rock upon which a hedgehog is napping under the sun…and the bee body, flower heads, rock, hedgehog and sun are all different spirographs!
The kid received one from an uncle. It was well used for a few months - then the peices were used in other projects, now it sits in the wardrobe barely remembered.
It outlasted many of the electrical games she’s had over the years.
The Sims 2 didn’t even make it throught the tutorials.
Very interesting. I’ve thought about scanning the drawings and then editing them in a graphics program. Elements could be added. The image could be distorted (made slimmer, wider, taller etc.) It might be a way to bring Spirograph into this century.
First, I have to give it to my cousin and see if she’ll draw with it. She draws a lot with those colored pencils. She outgrew crayons when she was 7. 
Speaking of which, why ISN’T there a virtual Spirograph? One of you guys needs to make me one!
I had one as a kid, very early 90s. My cousin and I would make the coolest designs we could and try to sell them to the neighbors as young kids. Creative AND entrepreneurial 