Cardboard ship

Here's a quick toy I made: a cardboard ship. We received a large package from Amazon, and it seemed a shame to throw out the big box. So, using scraps I found in the garage,

1. I cut off the tops with a knife, folded the two longest ones in half, and hot-glued to the front and the back of the "ship".

2. Taking a throwaway thick piece of wood, I drilled a small hole in the middle of it, just big enough to put into it a dowel. I hot-glued the whole thing to the bottom of the "ship".

3. I cut off a triangular piece of yellow cotton and hot-glued it around the dowel, as a sail.

4. I took a thick heavy dowel piece that was about one-half-of-the-box in length and hot-glued it to the bottom of the "sail", so it would actually look more like a sail keeping the triangular shape (so the two legs of the triangle are dowels).

5. I used one of the cardboard tops that I cut off for a flag: cut it into a triangular shape, wrote my sons names on it, folded around the "mast" and hot-glued it shut.

6. Then I put a piece of navy fabric under it to simulate a sea.

It took me around 30 minutes to complete. As you can see, the goal was to do it very quickly and use whatever I already had.

Bean bag game in an hour

This project, amazingly, took me less than an hour (about 50 minutes).

I took an piece of wood I had used for another project, a side table that A. broke, leaving me with a great piece of stained wood. I used an empty sour-cream container and a pencil to trace 6 circles on the unstained part of the wood.

I drilled huge pilot holes in each circle and jigsawed the circles out. Then I took a small paintbrush and white paint and drew numbers next to each hole (to signify the amount of "prizes" if the bean bag fell into that hole).


Then I got my sewing machine out, took a piece of nice cloth diapers that we never used (since we chickened out to standard, earth-unfriendly diapers in two days after the birth of our first son), and rice.

I quickly cut the cloth, didn't bother hemming it, just folded it, sewed across three edges, put in rice, pinned the fourth side and sewed across it, sewing it shut. I finished two toss bags (for each boy) in a few frantic minutes just before dinner.

Now, in theory I should sand the hole edges but I don't have the right sander;
and I need to make more toss bags; and I probably should attach something to the board so we don't have to use books to prop it up; but still, very quick project.

We played just a little bit today, because I didn't have any prizes prepared except little people. Unfortunately, the kids built a "fence" around a spaceship launching pad using most of our little people yesterday, so I only had 4 available to me as prizes, so the game didn't last long. I should use marbles next time.