Boys' Make-at-Home Things :: HOW TO MAKE YOUR OWN TOPS

HOW TO MAKE YOUR OWN TOPS

SOME toys don’t know how to play. They just stand still and wait for a child to carry them around the garden or drag them by their strings across the nursery floor. They have no proper play spirit, these lazy toys, but that isn’t the case with a top. Given a fair chance, just a fine, long string and a smooth sidewalk—why, a top will play with a child all day long. It will twirl and whirl, never stopping to rest for long, and singing all the time its quaint little humming song to keep tune and time with its spinning.

You can buy a top for a penny at the toy shop, but it is just a plain, ordinary sort of wooden top exactly like all the other tops. How would you like to make your own tops? It will be the easiest task in the world to do this, and a whole lot of fun, too. The materials for home-made tops grow out of doors and are lying close at hand at home, in the wood-shed, or in the cellar.

Sharpen your jack-knife, and you may start out top hunting, at once.

A beet makes a queer little top that will spin gayly for a day, and if it breaks on the sidewalk or curbing, why you may pull up another top from the beet patch in the garden. The picture shows you a beet top that looks like a very own cousin to a wooden top because it is just the same shape, and the same size. There should be a pointed peg whittled from a scrap of soft kindling wood and stuck in the pointed end of the beet. The beet top is then wound with a string that has a small button mold or a little china button on the end and when you throw it as you do an ordinary wooden peg top, it will spin finely. A small turnip will make a top, too, if it has a whittled peg, and a little radish makes a fine top, save that it is too small to be wound up and should have a bit of toothpick stuck in opposite the peg to twirl it by.

WHITTLED CLOWN TOP

The woods as well as the garden are full of tops. Let us go out top gathering under the nut trees some fine, frosty morning, taking the heroic little jack-knife, too, to help finish the tops. Fat acorns make splendid tops. A bit of twig should be whittled down to the right size and stuck in the flat end of the acorn by which to spin it. Every acorn has a fine point upon which to spin and a half dozen of these gay little acorn tops may be set spinning at once by a group of children in a top contest to see which will keep twirling longest. Horse chestnuts may be used for tops, too, if a child selects the very round, flat kind of nut. Horse chestnuts gathered when they first fall from the tree are soft and easily bored with an awl or darning needle, or the smallest blade of a jack-knife. A hole should be made exactly in the center of the nut and a perfectly straight piece of twig inserted, pointed at one end and extending a half inch above the horse chestnut at the top to hold it by. Another way to make a horse chestnut top is to cut the nut in half, crosswise, and insert halves of toothpicks in each section, making two tops instead of one.

When the shut-in days come in the winter and it is too late to pick your tops out in the garden or gather them in the woods, it will be ever so much fun to see how many tops you can make of the materials you are able to find at home. The wood that is used in a cigar box is soft and easily whittled, and just one box will furnish material for countless tops. The queer little circus clown in the picture spins on the tips of his toes if a top string is wound about the long peg protruding from the top of his head. He is not one bit difficult to make. The outline of a clown in a picture book is drawn on a sheet of tracing paper with a soft pencil and then transferred to a piece of the soft wood. If a boy has a jig saw it will be very easy to cut the little outlined clown in a jiffy, but it can be done in almost as short a time with a sharp jack-knife. When the clown is cut, his features are drawn in with charcoal or a soft pencil. If you spin him hard enough, he will rise right up off the ground once in a while and then settle down again and go on spinning. If a child has a book of brownies he can make a brownie top in the same way that the clown top was made. The brownie will spin on the tips of his little pointed toes.

The top in the picture that has a series of circles of different sizes will be ever so easy to make. The circles, each a half inch smaller than the one which is to be above it, are drawn on soft wood, and are then cut out with a jack-knife. A hole is cut in the center of each circle and they are fitted on a piece of wooden meat skewer, the point of the meat skewer forming the spinning end of the top. With a box of water color paints the circular disks of the tops are then painted in gay contrasting colors and the effect will be charming when the little top begins to spin.

(A) BEET TOP. (B) TOP MADE OF GRADUATED DISKS. (C) BUTTON MOLD TOP.Button molds make tops. The big wooden molds that the tailor uses for coats are best to make into tops. The hole in the center must be enlarged to admit of a sharpened end of a meat skewer being inserted. These button mold tops may be painted, too, and a splendid game can be played with them on the nursery table. Two stakes may be set up—the stakes from a parlor croquet set will do nicely—at the opposite ends of the table. The boys playing the game then choose colors and spin their button mold tops, whipping them with tiny whips made of meat skewers and colored twine, and trying to see whose top will make the distance between stakes first at the one spinning.

Clyx.com