Things I Made as a Kid
Growing up in the country in the 1970's, with lots of outdoor space and no nearby neighbor kids to play with, forced my siblings and me to find ways to entertain ourselves. I was curious and always looking for fun and cool things to do. I can't really say where all these ideas came from, but certainly, perusing craft and project books at the library was one big source of ideas. Some ideas were just obvious to a country kid, like making hay bale forts. And my well used and well worn American Boys Handy Book, this one printed in 1970 and which I still have, provided inspiration for many many crafts and activities.
I thought it would be fun to write about some of those things that I made and/or did and that I think are noteworthy. I hope you have fun reading about them!
Plaster Smiley Faces From Milk Jugs
Around 1975 or so, plastic gallon milk jugs where I grew up had a dimple in the side with a smiley face at the bottom of the dimple. I've tried to find pictures of this to include here, but to no avail; this is the best I can come up with.
Anyway, these smiley-face dimples became a source of fun, as I'd cut out the dimples to use as molds to create little plaster smiley faces. I'd then paint them and give to my friends. Where this idea came from I don't recall. My best guess comes from the fact that, for a period of time, Mom would take us kids to a craft shop that sold bare plaster shapes - animals, figurines, and so on - along with paints, which we'd buy and take home to paint. That undoubtedly led to the idea that we could make own plaster shapes, so at some point, a bag of plaster was obtained, and we'd do stuff with it. Plaster smileys appeared! I was reminded of the smileys by my K-through-12 classmate Barb at my last high school reunion. I'd forgotten about them, and may not have ever recalled it without her bringing it up after all those years. Thank you Barb!
Newspaper Trees
My siblings and I would make newspaper trees, and we'd make them very large. These were made of rolled up tubes of newspaper, several sheets taped together. We'd make cuts at one end to create the leaves, then pull the leaves and trunk out from the middle of the roll. This is a cool image (which I snipped out of a website called Corriegami - enjoy the French!) that shows how to make these.
With these trees, more sheets of paper made a taller tree. Our living room had a high ceiling with open rafters, about 12 feet, and in the 70's the newspapers were large, so we'd make trees that would reach up into the rafters. Tons of fun!
Nowadays, many newspapers have gone away, and those that remain have literally downsized to smaller formats. I think it would difficult nowadays to make newspaper trees in the way I made them as a kid.
Cardboard Toilet-Paper Tube Rockets
What better use for cardboard toilet paper tubes than to make a rocket! Googling "toilet paper tube rocket" yields a rather bland and mostly homegeneous presentation of single-tube creations decorated with colored paper, sparkles, streamers, and other nonsense, like these:
Not so with my creations, in which many bare brown coardboard tubes were taped together end-to-end to create a very tall rocket body; fins were created out of folded masking tape, or perhaps just three tubes taped around the end of the structure; and nose cones were made as long and pointy as possible, so that the rocket looked as much like something out of NASA as possible - in my eyes anyway! These rockets weren't really made for flying, though they'd be thrown anyway in the hope that they'd fly straight and long and true; instead, they'd usually tumble through the air, crashing and crumpling and breaking apart unceremoniously into several pieces. Good fun!
Paper Chains
Making paper chains is about as simple a thing as possible. I vaguely recall making these in Kindergarten, though I'm not certain about this, as a half-century-plus is a long way back to remember! Nevertheless, my siblings and I - and maybe me more than them! - found paper chain making to be a fun thing to do. So much so, that I'd make chains that would string through the whole house! We had a 2-story house with basement, and chains were sometimes long enough to drape from the farthest corner of an upstairs bedroom to the farthest corner of the basement. Why? Because I could!
I recall, for many of these chains, using discarded wide tractor-feed green-bar printer paper that Dad would bring home for us kids to use for crafty stuff. I'm not certain where it came from, but I think maybe it was from the UW Madison Computer Science Department. The paper was fascinating to me, having all kinds of cool computer-ey things printed on it! Dad would get us large stacks of this paper, so there was plenty for making paper chains, and the green bars allowed for uniform cutting and thus uniform paper link sizes. As above, this image is not entirely satisfactory, as it doesn't capture the reality of what I experienced as a kid. But I hope you get the idea.
Hay Bale Forts in the Barn
This story of of bale forts is much like my own. We had a multi-purpose pole shed that, for a good part of my childhood, held farm equipment and miscellaneous junk on one side, hay bales in most of the other side, and a corner allocated as a small livestock stall.
The hay was baled during the summer and stacked sometimes all the way up to the rafters in the barn. When the stack was sufficiently worked down - that is, fed out to lifestock, mostly cows - and particularly when the weather was much cooler, we kids would make forts in the haystack. Sometimes we'd augment the forts with planks and boards to make larger caverns and tunnels. Burrowing into a bale fort in the winter time, flashlight in hand, and curling up with a few purring kitty-cats was a not uncommon activity. The deep quiet, warmth, and feeling of safety was incredible.
A Fallen Tree Fort
We had a nice woodlot that would often have fallen trees. Sometimes boards and planks from the barn would be dragged out to such a tree and would be propped against the trunk to make a sort of lean-to shelter or fort. What I mainly remember of this is that the idea of a fort was far more exciting than the actual existence of one, which required sitting on the cold damp ground, crouching under a low roof, and having bugs crawling around and mosquitoes buzzing and stinging.
Next Time...
I have several more things I want to write about, but in the interest of keeping this post to a reasonable size, I'm going to leave these for a follow-up post. Stay tuned!