Toy-Making at Home: How to Make a Hundred Toys from Odds and Ends

The Project Gutenberg eBook, Toy-Making at Home, by Morley Adams
BY MORLEY ADAMS
NEW YORK FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY PUBLISHERS
Printed in Great Britain.
This work has been compiled with the assistance of Mr. Walter Higgins, the well-known instructor in woodwork.
The volume fulfils a long-felt want in that it supplies fascinating amusement for evenings at home. The making of toys is an engrossing pastime, and the home-made toy is invariably more novel than the shop-bought article and of superior quality, besides which there is always a satisfaction in I made it myself.
The purpose of the book is to give simple and easily understood instructions and plain diagrams and sketches for making toys from the odds and ends that are usually discarded as useless. Matches, Match Boxes, Cotton Reels, Cocoa Tins, Cigar Boxes, and even Egg Shells comprise the materials from which are evolved Shops, Working Models, Dolls' Furniture, Boats, Steam Engines, Windmills, and scores of other toys dear to the hearts of boys and girls.
Perhaps the chief charm of the occupation is that literally dozens of toys can be made at a cost of less than a penny. Every toy described in this book is practicable, and can be easily made by anyone possessing the smallest amount of handicraft skill. At the same time the instructions are such as will prove of the utmost value to instructors of handicraft classes.
MORLEY ADAMS.
In every household there are countless things which are thrown away immediately they have served one purpose. Cotton-reels may be taken as an instance. It does not occur to the majority of people that these little wooden articles, strongly made and well finished, may be put to some use, even when the cotton has been wound from them. Yet from them quite useful furniture can be made and playthings innumerable. And so it is with many other things—match boxes, broken clothes pegs, cocoa tins, mustard tins, egg shells, cigar boxes, nut shells, corks, incandescent-mantle cases, old broom handles: there is no end to the list.