Such toys as this can only be suggested very briefly, but children with any common sense and imagination can make most elaborate and delightful collections.
Fig. 111.
The box used for the byre or stable is only one of many more elaborate buildings that can be made. The dwelling house of larger boxes, the barns, the haystacks, the pigsty, the chicken coop, troughs, and such things can all be made of larger or smaller boxes. Buildings can be thatched with straw, rushes, hay; or corrugated paper may be put on the roof. The palings here are made of matches set into posts of wooden pegs, much like those used by gardeners to label plants. Trees and flowering plants can be made by getting small bushy bare twigs and wrapping their branches with moss, or fastening on everlasting flowers of gay dyed colors. Old sponges may be dyed green and cut up and fixed in the branches. A reel sawed in two makes a good plant pot for these.
The sheep illustrated here is made of a cork, with legs of matches. Its head is a tiny bean fixed to the cork with a pin, both neck and body are wrapped in cotton wool, and it is neatly fastened on with white mending yarn. The lamb is made of a large bean and a small one, with legs of pins; the beans must be soaked before setting in the pins. Noah's ark animals can be used to increase the live stock of the farm. Fields can be made of green crinkled paper, and a piece of glass or a tiny mirror can be used to make a pond. Carts, barrows, and farm implements can be made of all sorts of things, and clever children can really make wonderful farms. Windmills and other simple machines can be introduced also.
A DOLL'S HOUSE
These can be made of bandboxes or orange-boxes and can be either very simple or as elaborate as you please. If cardboard boxes are used, Figure 113 shows how it can most easily be arranged to give the pitch of the roof. One story may be piled on another so that the house can be enlarged at will. Doors and windows are easily cut in the cardboard boxes. The windows can also be glazed if you get a few rolls of cinematograph film and fit and paste it on, but children must be warned that this is very inflammable and it is dangerous to bring it near the fire or gas. The inside of the rooms may be papered, and on the walls little pictures may be pasted. The illustrated catalogues from furniture shops can often be cut up, and the diagrams of doors, etc., cut out and pasted on the doors of your house. Figure 112 shows a sitting-room and a little shop or kitchen. In the latter the counter and dresser are made of matchboxes. The shelves are of strips of cardboard with uprights of cane, wire, or knitting-needles. The fireplace in the sitting-room can be made of a lid of a cardboard box stitched to the wall, and in it another box (a matchbox, for instance) can be set to make the grate. A good table can be made as in Figure 114, which is made by using a lid of a small box, and to the inside of its corners glueing the legs, and then the larger top of thick cardboard can be fixed on with mucilage. The little shields for the corks of bottles, made of pleated lead foil, make very pretty pots and kitchen vessels in such little houses. Rugs can be woven of wool and string, and cushions, etc., to furnish the place. But there is no end to the things a child can make for a doll's house if imagination is encouraged to work the hands.
Figs. 112 to 114.