Shop at the Museum Stores: Brooklyn’s Museum of Art, Washington’s National Building Museum and Cleveland’s Museum of Art

We paid another visit to Washington’s National Building Museum and found that the online shop is well stocked.

There’s a new ‘green’ section with a water clock that it’s possible to add water to and a dash of table salt to the clock’s tank to make it work. Want to conserve a little water? Add a squeeze of lemon juice and you’ll have to refill less often. A Rubik’s Pepper mill is a new twist (sorry about that) on the familiar cube, a Frank Lloyd Wright Fallingwater Lego set and a Q-BA-MAZE that consist of interlocking transluscent structures for rolling balls through. Stack the cubes in many different configurations and watch the balls make their way through the maze. Other items are twirling spaghetti forks and Eiffel Tower and Pyramid erasers.

Cleveland Museum of Art’s store has some items we haven’t seen before, based on exhibits and works of art: Rousseau’s Fight Between a Tiger and a Buffalo becomes a night light as does Redon’s Vase of Flowers which is also shown in the same pattern as an umbrella or tote.

There’s a salt and pepper in the shape of a turquoise Faberge shoe and an Art of Africa address book.

We’ve found that our grandson is intrigued with art cubes and the Museum has one with six images from the exhibition Arms and Armor from Imperial Austria as well as another from Impressionist Landscapes.

In addition, consider a 500 piece puzzle, The Red Kerchief: Portrait of Madame Monet, to be enjoyed as well another 500 piece, Monet’s The Cliff, Entretat, Sunset.

At the Brooklyn Museum of Art, living in the borough helps but isn’t necessary to love the Brooklyn-in-a-Box board game: “It includes only authentic landmarks, among them the Brooklyn Museum. Other featured tokens include the Brooklyn Bridge, the Coney Island-Wonder Wheel, an egg cream, and a hot dog.” A whole page is devoted to items Brooklynites would love. Another page devoted to a more distant locale, Egypt, highlights a gold fertility figure, perhaps unneeded by most senior women, but nowadays … We’re personally fond of the William Morris honeysuckle card case.

A personal aside, your shopping correspondent lived in a mob-protected section of Brooklyn for a couple of years, one of four of the five boroughs we’ve been born, lived and worked in.