I enjoyed reading Clarissa Potter's memories of her childhood at the end of the instructions. Being a little "maker" is the natural state of children, unfortunately parents flood them with pre-made stuff. Kids don't know better when they fall for ads. The fact kids love Legos so deeply shows their little clever souls are yearning to create their own things. Better than nothing! but not as good as poking around and finding your own building materials.
... A bag of dried pumpkin seeds holds resources of solid enjoyment for the little people who are experts in stringing buttons and beads, and can count.
The forehanded, good man of our house and fields always dries and stores away many more such seeds than he possibly can use in planting time, and he knows it, so he makes no complaint when the children have a saucer of pumpkin seeds about, of which they are making mats and baskets.
The oddest table mat I ever saw was made of a circle of paste board covered and bound with stout, bright flannel, and on the flannel were sewed scores, yes, hundreds of small, white, earthen buttons arranged in circles about the outer edge of the card board, and within in wild confusion. Next in oddness is one of pumpkin seeds, and children in the home, of both first and second childhood, enjoy making both mats.
To make a mat of pumpkin seeds, string at their points, on stout linen thread, nineteen seeds resting on their sides; draw snugly into a circle and fasten and break thread. Between each of these nineteen bases, string the points of two seeds. Again draw into a circle and tie thread. Between each of these nineteen pairs of bases string at their points three seeds; draw close and secure thread as before.
So far, mat and basket of pumpkin seeds are made alike. If the work is for a mat, continue increasing one seed to those strung at their points and placed between the bases of each succeeding circle. If you find the mat is rufiiing, getting fulness too fast, omit increasing the number of seeds strung at points for a row or more, to insure a smooth, flat mat. Finish outer row with a stout thread run through bases of pumpkin seeds, and then wind edge with a bright ribbon passed over and between the groups of seeds.
A pumpkin seed basket is made by continuing stringing seeds in triplets between bases of each preceding row till three rows are made besides the row of double seeds placed between the bases of the nineteen seeds of the first circle. This forms a flat base for basket with rounded sides.
A pretty bail is made by stringing on two wires, face to face, thirty-eight seeds; wires to run through bases and points, alternately, till a flat web is made the width of a pumpkin seed’s length. Fasten ends of bail wires to opposite edges of basket and then wind between each pair of seeds on edges of handle—the windings not to come opposite —-with narrow ‘ribbon. Finish basket with pretty ribbon knots placed over points where handle is fastened to basket.
In that bright, glad time of “when I was a little child,” we built ingenious houses and laid out: famous grounds with acorn cups and saucers, from which I think we derived more pleasure than children nowadays can from their patented, smartly painted building blocks. Acorn cups standing on their bases was our building material; the soft, warm hearth rug before the dining-room’s open fire, as near as possible to mother’s rocker, was our field of quiet enjoyment.
We grouped the acorns in a big square for the outer walls of the ground floor of our house, then filled in partition walls, leaving loop-holes for doors to our double parlors and cozy kitchen and bedrooms, with narrow walks between two long acorn rows for halls and corridors. Similar long, winding lanes led to our capacious barns and outbuilding, with cunning gateways opening into farm yards and outer fields. They were made of little cedar posts that would stand upright on their smoothly whittled bases, with lengths of tough rye straw for bars that needed continual letting down and putting up that the cattle might pass.
Watering troughs we had along every driveway and fence and wall. Flat-bottomed acorn saucers they were, filled with water. And our cattle ? Well, they were queer little blocks of cedar, with rounded heads and rumps, and four fat legs that were as uneven as the stanchions of broken-headed darning needles stuck in the floor, to which our cattle were tethered by means of a cotton thread looped round their chunky necks.
We then thought that it was the happy game, the cozy fire, the warm, bright sunshine fiecking the carpet that made the room so sunny and pleasant and our play and life so rich with happiness, but we know now, after all these long years, that it was mother’s presence, our nearness to her, and our safe trust in her for everything that made our child life so full of
comfort and sunshine. — Clarissa Potter.
Clarissa Potter wrote for magazines. She wrote about how to care for children as well as stories like this.
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