  IT is going to be a circus small enough to fit in any house. In fact, it will be possible to put it within the boundaries of an old table. Because you can’t always have an outdoor show is just the reason that you are going to plan this fine, diminutive one in the house. It may take several days to get it ready, but once your indoor circus is finished, you will find it almost if not quite as interesting as a real one. First, find an old table somewhere to be used as a circus ground. A pine table will serve nicely, and if you can find some old green muslin with which to cover it, you will discover that it looks exactly like the grass in the field where the real circus is held. Tack the muslin to the under side of the table top so that it will not wrinkle and interfere with the circus parade. Now you are ready for the rope fence which always encloses a circus ground. In the four corners of the table bore, with a gimlet, through the canvas, some holes that are just the right size to hold dowel sticks, five inches THE GREAT AND ONLY ANIMAL SHOW All around the edges of the bill you can draw pictures of wild animals with your colored pencils. The circus ground will look very much pleasanter if you have a few trees standing about on Meat skewers will do nicely for the tree trunks if you fringe ever so many narrow, doubled strips of green tissue paper, and wind them with it, fastening the fringes to the meat skewer with mucilage. The green paper flutters in the air quite like real foliage in the breeze on circus day, and the little trees will stand up nicely if you stick the end of each skewer inside an empty spool, glueing it there so that it will stay in place. Did you think that you were never coming to the tent for your circus? Well, here it is, and the picture shows you just how to construct it. You will need to enlarge the diagram several times the size which you see in the picture, but that is easily accomplished by means of your ruler and lead pencil. Use some sort of tough, firm paper for the tent. Water color paper will be splendid because you can get out your paint box and paint pictures of wild men and palm trees and animals on the sides. If you have no water color paper, use brown bristol board. The latter makes a fine stiff tent. Cut out the top and sides as carefully as you can, bend them, and glue or paste them together. Then stand the tent up in the center of your circus ground. Pattern for Circus Tent. There are patterns for them, too, which you will see in the picture and which are so simple as to be very easily enlarged. The animals can be made of the same kind of paper which you used for the tent, and then painted, the elephant gray, the camel a soft brown and the deer a dull reddish color, or you can cut them out of wood. This is perhaps the better way. Use thin pieces of very soft, white wood. An excellent wood is holly or soft pine, in the thin sheets which are used for jig saw work, and for making picture puzzles. Draw the pattern of the animal which you wish to make first very carefully on your piece of wood. Give your best jack-knife two or three turns on a grindstone so that it will be nice and sharp, and then go to work cutting the animal, not your fingers. Make as many animals as you can, and glue their feet to tiny blocks of kindling wood so that they will stand. Touch them up a little with paint, too, to make them look wilder. If you want cages for your animals use empty spool boxes, covers and all. Cut bars in the cover of each box with your jack-knife, stand the animal inside and put the cover back on. The box rests on cardboard wheels which are glued to the long, narrow side of the box. |
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