A Pretty Design of Green Peas
Fig.183 - Do not open the pods wide.
This is not a toy, but you will like to make it just the same, and afterward, perhaps, you will want to try another design all by yourself. If you can draw at all, with a soft pencil make some curves on a piece of white paper like [Fig. 181], only ever so much larger, then a straight line up from the centre. The distance between the two largest curves at their widest part should be about eight inches. If you cannot draw these curves, ask some older person to do it for you.
Lay your paper with the pattern drawn on it flat on the table before you, shell some peas and carefully place them on the pencil lines of the curves. Begin with the largest peas at the centre of the design and finish with the smallest at the ends of the curves. [Fig. 182] shows how this is done. Put the first pea on the curve at the place shown by the arrow in [Fig. 181].
You won't be able to keep the peas in place unless you stick them to the paper with paste. Hold the tube of paste in your left hand, squeeze out a very little, take it off the tube with one of the peas and push the pea, paste side down, onto the paper where it belongs.
When the peas are all placed on the curves open two pea-pods as you did for the greenies' tent, slide one pod between the two halves of the other, and with a little paste on the stem ends and the tips, fasten them in the middle above the curves of peas as they are shown in [Fig. 182]. The two halves of each pod are not opened wide but are like [Fig. 183]. Above the pods, on the straight, upright line, place four more peas, beginning at the bottom with a large pea and ending with one much smaller.
The success of this design will depend upon making one side just like the other and in keeping it equally balanced. That is, one side must not sag down below the other and the pods at the top must fit exactly on the line, half on one side, half on the other.
The peas, you see, do not touch each other, but are separated by little spaces, and the spaces are all of the same length.