Part 4
Perhaps it will pick up a crew of little brownie sailor men. Perhaps it will stop somewhere to load a cargo of butterfly’s gowns. You will lose sight of it though. That is what always happens to one’s toy ships.
A boy can make himself a whole fleet of toy boats to play with in the mill pond and the trout brook. If one of them does go sailing away to Fairyland--why, what does it matter with all the rest of the fleet just tugging away at their ropes, waiting to be launched?
The little boats are the nicest of all, because one may have so many of them. Out in the woods there are some of last year’s walnuts lying on the ground. Split one in half with a jack-knife, and take out all the meat, leaving the inside smooth and white. Glue a scrap of paper to a toothpick, and fasten this little mast to the inside of the half walnut shell with a drop of glue. There is a real fairy craft, fit for a dragon fly to ride in. Just watch it toss and float and sail away on the make-believe waves.
There are so many eggs in the barn, you can surely have one. Do you know how to blow an egg? Make a tiny hole with a pin in each end, then, by blowing steadily into one end, the contents of the egg may be emptied out of the other. You will be able to cut the egg shell lengthwise, now, with your jack-knife. If you have some paper strips you can bind the edges of the egg boat to make it a trifle stronger. Glue two paper seats across the top and add a pair of oars made of toothpicks. A tiny paper doll will enjoy a ride in the egg-shell boat.
Out in the barn where you found the egg, there is a whole big bin full of corn cobs. Such light, clean playthings they are! They will make a stout little raft to float about in the mill pond. You will need to select eight corn cobs, all of the same size and length. Lay them side by side on the barn floor. Then split up an old berry basket, and cut two or more of the thin strips of wood from the side exactly as long as the raft is to be wide, lay these strips of wood across the corn cobs and nail them in place with tacks. The corn-cob raft is done. It is so light that it can be loaded with quite a cargo, two or three rubber dolls who do not mind the water, or a toy horse, or a rubber pig. Then, if the current is right, it will float way across the mill pond, and the toys can land on the other side.
Corks make a fine raft, too, and such a light one! A cork raft will almost never sink. You must collect corks for quite a while before you have enough for the raft. They will need to be of just the same width and length. Glue five or six corks together by their ends to form a little cork log. Make a number of these logs, and then fasten them together as you fastened the corn-cob raft. Another way of making the cork raft is to run the corks on a bit of fine wire and the logs may all be wired together in the same way.
A very large, flat cork, such as mother puts in her pickle jars, will make a fine little sail boat. All that it needs is a toothpick mast and a white cambric or paper sail glued on.
A paper row boat is very easy to make. Choose an oblong of heavy paper that will not soak with the water quickly. Fold a cocked soldier’s hat. Every boy knows how to do that. Hold the cocked hat in the middle of each side and pull it out into a square. Bend back the two open sides to form another cocked hat, but smaller than the first one. Pull this out, also, into a square. Then, if you pull hard on the two closed corners, the paper will open into a fine little row boat. You can fold so many of these paper boats that a new one may be launched as fast as the old one sinks.
A boy who is clever with his jack-knife will be able to make a stout little sail boat from a piece of an old egg crate, or the side of a cigar box. The wood must be close grained and light--that is the first essential. Cut the boat, pointed at one end, and rub it smooth with a piece of sandpaper. Glue a meat skewer to the center for the mast, and hoist a little sail. A hole may be bored in the end of the sail boat, and a long string tied in will allow you to run along the edge of the brook and keep this little craft from sailing away.
There are other boats which will want to join this toyland fleet. Peanut shells may have very tiny paper sails pinned to the ends. A race between two rival peanut boats will be great fun.
A cigar box boat may have squares cut from the sides with a knife for oar locks; with meat skewer oars, it will make a very creditable scow, flat-bottomed, and perfectly safe for any doll to go clamming in.
Clam shells may have paper sails fastened on with glue, and any kind of flat shell loves to go sailing away by itself on the water.
A strong square of birch bark may be folded and cut rounding at the ends to resemble a canoe. The ends are then sewed with a needle threaded with strands of sweet grass or stout cotton, making a tiny Indian craft. If you wish the canoe to be perfectly water tight, it can be lined with waxed paper.
There will be fun for all summer long for the boy who makes and sails his own fleet of toy boats.
HOW TO MAKE A PLAY TENT
Having a tent out in the garden or on the lawn during the summer vacation makes each long, happy day twice as long, and just twice as happy. A boy can play that he is an Indian, or a first settler, or a cave dweller, or even an old story book king if he has even the crudest kind of a roof over his head and some sort of a play shelter beneath which he can live and play, and dream all manner of delightful things.
Of course the nicest tent of all is one from a real tent factory made of canvas and having staples and pegs to fasten it to the ground, but such a tent costs ever so much money, and not every mother and father can afford to buy it. One family of children went without fireworks on Fourth of July that they might save the money which they would have, otherwise, burned up and with it they bought themselves a tent which lasted much longer than the smoke and noise of the fireworks would have.
There is, though, a very fine tent indeed, and one that will give a group of boys quite as much pleasure as any manufactured one. This is the home-made tent. It is the tent that seems to really belong to you because it is a sort of a makeshift and you make it with your own hands. There are ever so many ways of making your own tent, all of them simple and quite easy for one to follow.
One very strong and serviceable tent has a foundation of straight, young birch trees or saplings cut in the early spring and used for tent poles. Holes should be dug, and the poles set in the ground a quarter their length that no summer wind storm can uproot them. Around each pole, the earth is then pounded down, and the tops of the poles, six or eight in number, should be lashed together with cord. A couple of old army blankets may be stitched together to make a covering for this tent. A hole is cut in the center and the covering is slipped over the supports and tied to the base of each pole. There will be enough extra blanket to make a flap in the front of the tent to act as a door. If there is a summer shower when the children are playing in this blanket tent they may pull the flap tight shut, and just snuggle inside, listening to the raindrops that do not soak through the blanket covering one bit.
A second home-made tent has a foundation of bean poles or clothes poles for supports. These are sunk in the ground and fastened together at the top as were the saplings used for the blanket tent. The covering, however, is of brown denim. Twelve yards will make a very good-sized tent. The lengths are cut to fit the poles used as tent supports; they are pointed at the top, and stitched together. Tape sewed at the top, center, and base of each seam, on the inside, may be tied around the poles and fasten the covering to the props. This tent may be decorated in such a way that it will make a real patch of color on the lawn or in the back yard, and will have the appearance of an Indian’s wigwam. Red and green, or yellow denim is used for the decorations. Small conventionalized trees, moons, stars, leaves, or any preferred designs are cut from the colored cloth and stitched to the brown covering. Another way of decorating the denim tent is to paint pictures on it with stencil colors, using stencil patterns of Indians, animals, or flowers. These colors are “fast” and the rain will not wash them off as is apt to happen in the case of designs applied with colored cloth.
A flower tent is a new sort of playhouse and is quite delightful in sunshiny weather. When it rains you can watch your tent grow from the house windows. It will be wise to select a fence corner, where a row of castor beans will sprout in a night almost to help form the back of the tent. Between these castor plants, there may be some quick-growing vine planted; mock orange, morning glory, or moon flower. As the seeds sprout and the vines begin to grow, they should be twined upon strings which extend up the fence and across the top between the two sides of the fence, forming the tent roof. Before summer is over, this roof will be a thick one as the vines increase their leaves and the leaves themselves grow larger and more lavish of their shade. After a while they will hang over the front of the tent helping to form a third side, and when the tent bursts into blossom the children who live inside it will feel almost as if they were in fairyland.
These tents all take time to make, but there are other home-made tents that can spring up in a day in the garden. A very little boy can set up grandfather’s big green umbrella for a tent and have a pleasant time sitting under it. The handle can be buried a little way in the ground and there will be plenty of room beneath its delightful green shade for a boy and a picture book, or a little girl and her doll. To make this umbrella tent still more snug and sheltering, grandmother’s shawl can be draped around it, or a rug may be pinned to the edges to form the back and walls.
Two boys who live next door to each other and are the friendliest of neighbors can make a tent that they can share. The village carpenter will furnish four stout pine posts a little taller than the fence between the boys’ homes is high. Two of these posts are set up on one side of the fence about eight feet from the fence itself, and two on the other side in just the same position. The ticking cover of an old feather bed may be cut down to the right size, and nailed to the posts for a roof. A couple of old sails may be cut into straight curtains for the sides of the tent, with strips of lath in the hem so that they can be rolled up in pleasant weather. The tent is very cozy when it is finished, and before the summer is over nearly every boy in town will have been up to visit these boys in their little two-room tent.
HOW TO MAKE YOUR OWN TOPS
Some toys don’t know how to play. They just stand still and wait for a child to carry them around the garden or drag them by their strings across the nursery floor. They have no proper play spirit, these lazy toys, but that isn’t the case with a top. Given a fair chance, just a fine, long string and a smooth sidewalk--why, a top will play with a child all day long. It will twirl and whirl, never stopping to rest for long, and singing all the time its quaint little humming song to keep tune and time with its spinning.
You can buy a top for a penny at the toy shop, but it is just a plain, ordinary sort of wooden top exactly like all the other tops. How would you like to make your own tops? It will be the easiest task in the world to do this, and a whole lot of fun, too. The materials for home-made tops grow out of doors and are lying close at hand at home, in the wood-shed, or in the cellar.
Sharpen your jack-knife, and you may start out top hunting, at once.
A beet makes a queer little top that will spin gayly for a day, and if it breaks on the sidewalk or curbing, why you may pull up another top from the beet patch in the garden. The picture shows you a beet top that looks like a very own cousin to a wooden top because it is just the same shape, and the same size. There should be a pointed peg whittled from a scrap of soft kindling wood and stuck in the pointed end of the beet. The beet top is then wound with a string that has a small button mold or a little china button on the end and when you throw it as you do an ordinary wooden peg top, it will spin finely. A small turnip will make a top, too, if it has a whittled peg, and a little radish makes a fine top, save that it is too small to be wound up and should have a bit of toothpick stuck in opposite the peg to twirl it by.
The woods as well as the garden are full of tops. Let us go out top gathering under the nut trees some fine, frosty morning, taking the heroic little jack-knife, too, to help finish the tops. Fat acorns make splendid tops. A bit of twig should be whittled down to the right size and stuck in the flat end of the acorn by which to spin it. Every acorn has a fine point upon which to spin and a half dozen of these gay little acorn tops may be set spinning at once by a group of children in a top contest to see which will keep twirling longest. Horse chestnuts may be used for tops, too, if a child selects the very round, flat kind of nut. Horse chestnuts gathered when they first fall from the tree are soft and easily bored with an awl or darning needle, or the smallest blade of a jack-knife. A hole should be made exactly in the center of the nut and a perfectly straight piece of twig inserted, pointed at one end and extending a half inch above the horse chestnut at the top to hold it by. Another way to make a horse chestnut top is to cut the nut in half, crosswise, and insert halves of toothpicks in each section, making two tops instead of one.
When the shut-in days come in the winter and it is too late to pick your tops out in the garden or gather them in the woods, it will be ever so much fun to see how many tops you can make of the materials you are able to find at home. The wood that is used in a cigar box is soft and easily whittled, and just one box will furnish material for countless tops. The queer little circus clown in the picture spins on the tips of his toes if a top string is wound about the long peg protruding from the top of his head. He is not one bit difficult to make. The outline of a clown in a picture book is drawn on a sheet of tracing paper with a soft pencil and then transferred to a piece of the soft wood. If a boy has a jig saw it will be very easy to cut the little outlined clown in a jiffy, but it can be done in almost as short a time with a sharp jack-knife. When the clown is cut, his features are drawn in with charcoal or a soft pencil. If you spin him hard enough, he will rise right up off the ground once in a while and then settle down again and go on spinning. If a child has a book of brownies he can make a brownie top in the same way that the clown top was made. The brownie will spin on the tips of his little pointed toes.
The top in the picture that has a series of circles of different sizes will be ever so easy to make. The circles, each a half inch smaller than the one which is to be above it, are drawn on soft wood, and are then cut out with a jack-knife. A hole is cut in the center of each circle and they are fitted on a piece of wooden meat skewer, the point of the meat skewer forming the spinning end of the top. With a box of water color paints the circular disks of the tops are then painted in gay contrasting colors and the effect will be charming when the little top begins to spin.
Button molds make tops. The big wooden molds that the tailor uses for coats are best to make into tops. The hole in the center must be enlarged to admit of a sharpened end of a meat skewer being inserted. These button mold tops may be painted, too, and a splendid game can be played with them on the nursery table. Two stakes may be set up--the stakes from a parlor croquet set will do nicely--at the opposite ends of the table. The boys playing the game then choose colors and spin their button mold tops, whipping them with tiny whips made of meat skewers and colored twine, and trying to see whose top will make the distance between stakes first at the one spinning.
THE FARM THE SCISSORS BUILT
It will be almost as fine as a real farm when it is finished and ever so much easier to make, because one will not need any boards, or tools, or huge nails to use in putting it together.
What do you suppose the barn is made of? Why, just a big piece of heavy wrapping paper that some one has brought to the house, and then has dropped on the hall table to be thrown away because it does not seem to be of any use now its wrapping days are over.
First, one should cut the heavy wrapping paper into a large square. Then fold the square into sixteen small squares like the folding indicated in the diagram. Some of the lines in the diagram are dotted. Those show how the square is folded to make the little squares. Some of the lines are solid, heavy lines. Those are the lines to be cut. Make these cuts very carefully with scissors. There will be three cuts, each one square long and one square apart on two opposite sides of the paper. The two middle squares which are marked “a” in the diagram should be superimposed. That is a very, very long word, is it not? It means something very simple, though. These two squares are laid, one on top of the other, and are glued into place. Next, the squares marked “b” are brought together and their edges are glued. Then--one end of the wrapping paper barn is finished. Glue the squares at the other end of the barn in the same way, and cut a wide barn door. The door is made by cutting on a vertical crease on one side of the house, making two other cuts at right angles with the first one, and folding back the two sides of the door at the opening. If you want a window where you can toss hay up into the barn loft, it may be cut just above the door. A boy who has seen the inside of a real barn will be able to cut some strips of the heavy paper, and paste them together, fastening them to the back wall of the barn to show where the cow and the horse stalls are.
Some more strips of paper may be pasted together to form a barnyard fence. The barn may stand on the nursery table with the fence all around it, or an old suit box of mother’s will make a very fine barnyard indeed. The sides of the box should be ruled with a pencil to look like the bars in a real barnyard fence. Then you can cut the bars with a jack-knife, or some sharp pointed scissors. When you have finished the suit-box barnyard, the barn may stand in one corner of it.
Now you are ready to cut some animals to live in the barn.
The pictures in your animal picture books will make splendid patterns for the barnyard animals. Trace the animals with some tissue paper and then transfer these patterns to some stiff paper. When you have cut carefully on the traced outline, you may paste the animal’s feet to cardboard standards to make them stand up. There may be cows, and horses, and a donkey, and a whole flock of barnyard fowls. Then you may color the barn creatures with your water color paints or with colored pencils.
You can make a fine, large farm wagon, also, to stand beside the barn. To make the wagon, you should fold a small square of paper as you folded the large one for the barn. Instead of using the whole square, though, as you did for the barn, you must cut off a strip of four squares. Then make the short cuts as you did for the barn in the ends of the oblong piece of paper. Lay the three square laps which you have made by the cutting together, and paste them--one on top of the other. Cut out some wheels and fasten them to the cart. Glue on some cardboard or sticks for shafts, and the farm wagon is done.
If you want a wheelbarrow in the barnyard, you may cut one of mother’s old spool boxes in half. The edges where you made the cut should be curved. A wheel made of an empty spool, or a cardboard disk may be fastened to one end with a pin, and some cardboard legs may be glued to the wheelbarrow.
When the paper farm is complete, you must harness the donkey to the wagon, and set him to work. Cut out some of the gay pictures of fruit and vegetables that fill the seed catalogues, and load the wagon.
Fill the wheelbarrow, too. Cut out some paper overall boys to visit the farm and spend the summer. There is no end to the plays that the paper farm will suggest to you.
MORE BOX PLAYS
One of father’s empty note paper boxes, a starch box, a box that held spools of thread once--one, or all of these will furnish delightful play material for an afternoon in the house. A box has not finished its usefulness when its contents are gone. It is strong and tough often still, and ready for all kinds of fun.
Some cardboard boxes, large and small, will make the toy farm establishment shown in the picture. A box that once was filled with writing paper serves for the barn. The box stands on one side, leaving the entire front open that toy animals can be put in and taken out with greater ease than if there were a door. The long edge of the box cover is cut to fit the box, inserted and glued in place to form the front of the stalls which hold the toy animals. Shorter lengths of the cover edge are fitted in between the back of the box and this front partition to separate the stalls and are also glued in place. When these are in, a door can be cut. The stalls must be furnished with little grain boxes for the play horses to eat from; and this is the way to make them.
Measure with a school ruler and cut out a four-inch square of heavy wrapping paper. Lay the paper on a table in front of you and fold, first, the front edge up to the back, and then the front and back edges down to meet the center fold. Now turn the paper around, repeating the folding until there are sixteen squares. Cut off a row of four squares, leaving an oblong piece of paper that contains twelve squares. Make two cuts in the opposite narrow ends of the paper, one square long and one square apart. Fold up these squares and paste them, one on top of the other, forming a little oblong box. One of these boxes pasted to the back of each stall looks just like a grain trough, and may be filled with oats, if a country boy is making the farm, for the little horse to eat.
Some of the wrapping paper that remains after the grain boxes are finished makes the roof of the barn. Cut a strip as wide as the barn is deep and once and a half as long. Fold it once through the center and, at the ends, fold down flaps by means of which the roof can be glued to the top of the box forming a hay loft. When spring comes you can cut grass blades with a pair of gardener’s shears, dry them in the sun, and fill the loft of this little box barn with real, play hay.