Any number of tiny boats may be made of corks, nutshells, eggshells, with sails of paper and cloth, masts and oars of toothpicks, skewers or twigs, seats of paper or pasteboard.
Rafts may be made of sticks, corncobs, or strips of bark bound together with raffia, grasses, or cord. A canoe may be made of birch bark or leather sewed together at the ends, and lined with oiled paper, rubber cloth or oilcloth to make it water-tight. This will carry dolls and cargo.
Furniture. This can be made by the wholesale.
Paper. The easiest way is to use the paper square, folded into sixteen squares, folding and cutting away to get the desired proportions. Paper circles are used for wheels, rockers, mirrors, stove lids; silver paper for mirrors; gilt paper for brass ornaments. Water color gives realistic touches.
Pasteboard. Sheet bristol board may be used, first drawing the design carefully, providing for lapping, folding along the marked lines, and pasting the laps. In this way any desired size can be had. The designs can first be made in paper.
Pasteboard boxes require less work. Spools may be glued to a box cover as legs for a table or chair. Small spools for legs, or pasteboard semicircles fastened on for rockers, transform a box into a cradle. Safety match boxes glued on top of each other, with a paper fastener or button attached as a knob to the sliding sections, make a tiny chiffonier; a pasteboard frame attached to the back has a silver paper mirror or even one of the tiny real glass pocket mirrors. Beds may be made by fastening a pasteboard strip for head and foot board to the ends of a shallow oblong box. A poster bed is made from an oblong box and cover, sticking four skewers at the corners for legs and posts.
Crude wooden furniture can be made from soft blocks of wood fastened together with small wire nails. Chairs are made by nailing a back strip to a block seat; tables by nailing a square or round top to a center block or to blocks at each corner for legs.
Grocery boxes, shoe boxes, cigar boxes, fruit crates, will furnish cheap material of pine wood. This, however, splits easily, has knotholes and splinters, and is a last resort. An assortment of whitewood, one-half inch thick, in one, two, three and four-inch width strips, will be much more satisfactory. Patterns and dimensions should first be made.
Dishes. Nutshells, sea shells, acorn cups, leaves, gourds, chips, corn husks, pea pods, milkweed pods, eggshells, hollowed out apples, potatoes, squashes are the merest suggestion of the natural dishes suitable to a primitive and child life society.
Modeling clay or plasticine are the most satisfactory materials for dishes. Many dishes and utensils can be cut freehand in outline from Manila or silver paper, tin foil, bristol board. Children at nine or ten can work in hammered brass and bent iron.