Boys' Make-at-Home Things :: A TOY INDIAN VILLAGE

A TOY INDIAN VILLAGE

JUST fancy an encampment of real, live Indians in the house in a little Indian village that you made all yourself! It will be the best sort of fun to make the camp, and when it is done it will be a fine, new plaything for all winter long, as the toy Indians have sham fights, and May dances and tell each other stories around their tiny camp fires. And this is the way to make the fascinating toy.

A long, shallow tin with very narrow sides is the foundation for the Indian village. The tinsmith has large sheets of bright new tin, and he will make you one of these shallow tin trays for just a few cents. The florist will give you a basket of soft, black earth—enough to fill the tray—and you can mold and pat it into tiny hills and queer little valleys, and long foot paths, no wider than your little finger for the toy Indians to trail up and down.

You must take a long walk now as far as the woods to find some sprays of white pine, hemlock, and spruce for the Indians’ trees. Gather some little straight twigs, too, for wigwam foundations, and if the ground is still bare, pick up some of the prettiest pebbles you can find for make-believe rocks in the Indian encampment. With your jack-knife strip from the birch tree just a very little bark to make an Indian canoe—not much, for it takes a birch a long, long time to grow more bark. Then you may go home again, but on the way, buy a penny’s worth of grass seed at the florist’s. What are you to do with all these things?

Just listen, and you will find out.

Scatter the grass seed very softly over the earth in your tray and sprinkle it with the rubber bulb sprayer that mother uses for her house ferns. You would not believe it perhaps, but in a week or ten days your little Indian camp ground will be covered with a carpet of soft, green grass really growing in the earth. After you have planted the grass seed, stick the little evergreen trees in the earth and lay your pebbles about as if they really belonged there on the ground. In one corner of the tray, if mother is willing, you may sink a shallow, round cake tin filled with water to make a miniature lake, and about the lake you can put a border of stones covered with the moss that comes in a box of Noah’s Ark animals. The tray of earth is quite transformed now into a tiny forest.

Pattern for Toy Wigwam.Under the trees the Indian wigwams are scattered. Making these tepees is ever so much fun and will fill a long winter evening after your lessons are learned and you have the library table free to work on. Fig. 1 shows you how to cut out an Indian wigwam, and heavy dark brown paper or brown canvas is a strong material to use. When the wigwam is cut, it may be decorated with paints in any design you wish. A border of small squares is an attractive decoration, or some grotesque heads and bows and arrows may be painted on. Gold or red paper stars and crescents and suns may be cut and glued to the outside of the wigwam, forming a very gay scheme of trimming it, or very tiny autumn leaves may be waxed and glued on. When a number of these little wigwams have been cut, decorated, and glued together, as shown in Fig. 2, place them in your play forest, using two or three twigs crossed for supports, the ends extending through the hole in the top of the wigwam.

Now you can make the Indians. English walnuts form the heads. These are just the right size, brown enough for the complexion of any Indian, and nicely wrinkled, too. With a sharp jack-knife smooth down a few of the walnut’s wrinkles, and carve the Indian’s features, trying to give him high cheek bones. Color his cheeks with vermilion and paint his face, too, in as many different colors as you like. A roll of stiff paper or cloth glued to the nut head makes the Indian’s body, about which is wrapped a blanket of fringed crÉpe paper, red flannel, or any sort of gay stuff that mother will give you. This walnut Indian wears a marvelous feather headdress. The feathers come from the chicken yard or the oldest feather duster—whichever source is available—and they are glued to a strip of brown paper which, in turn is glued to the little Indian’s head.

There should be a whole tribe of Indians, as many as you can make before bedtime, and when it comes morning run up to the play room and stand the Indian braves at the doors of their wigwams or in the little path between the trees where they can see their real green grass coming up, and enjoy the friendly shelter of their fine little camping ground.

These nut Indians will need bows and arrows when they have sham battles. Tiny twigs may be bent bow shape with rubber bands for bow strings and burned out matches may be sharpened to a point for arrows. Toothpicks make arrows, too. A bow and a bundle of arrows may be laid at the door of each little Indian’s wigwam. The canoe that floats on the tin pan lake is made of a strip of folded birch bark shaped at the ends like a real canoe and stitched with brown linen thread. It will really float if it is carefully made.

For a camp fire, pile up some broken twigs in a cleared spot in your Indian encampment and put in some scraps of twisted, red tissue paper which will look like flames. One of the kettles from the dolls’ kitchen may hang on a forked stick over this make-believe fire to cook the dinner for the walnut Indian tribe.

This play Indian village will last all winter, a comfortable camping ground for the tribe, and a delightful plaything for the clever boy who made it.

There may be some walnut squaws added perhaps, and some peanut papooses wrapped in blankets cut from a scrap of old chamois and hung contentedly by thread to the sheltering trees. The grass will grow so high that it may have to be mowed with the nursery scissors, and when the trees fade, more can be gathered and put in the places of the old ones.

Clyx.com