How to Make Wooden Farm Toys Book

I have just released a new book with the plans for the wooden farm toys I have been making for my kids. It’s called How to Make Wooden Farm Toys: Scroll Saw Patterns and Plans.  It includes plans to build a toy combine with two interchangeable heads, a toy skid steer loader, a tractor and a disk to pull behind the tractor.  Some pictures of the completed combine along with a link to buy the book on Amazon are posted below.

 

Initial Design of an Entryway Locker

I have just finished creating a model of an entryway locker that I plan to start building soon as a donation to for a local charity dinner.  When finished I will post pictures of the construction and detailed plans.

Click on the picture below to be able to interact with a 3D PDF model of the Locker.  Note you will need Adobe Acrobat reader installed in order to view and interact with the model.

How to Make a Doll Sleeping Bag

My daughter’s dolly needed a warm place to sleep, so we went to our scrap fabric drawer and pulled out a scrap of fleece with a fun pattern larger enough to fit the doll. We placed Anna (the doll’s name) on the fabric and sized it to her.

You can see below that we folded the fabric to create a bag on the bottom for the doll to sleep in and into a space for a pillow on the top.

Now make sure that the fabric is inside out and all the edges are straight with the openings folded over approximately 1/4 inch.  Now it’s time to dig out the sewing machine.  (I don’t have much of a sewing machine, but it gets the job done. It’s a Shark Mini Sewing Machine and they cost around $20.)   Sew each side of the sleeping bag two times for a little extra stregth.

Next I used fabric glue to glue the lip down.

We then flipped the sleeping bag right side out and commenced to stuff the pillow area with some excess fabric in order to make a fluffier pillow.

Finally we glued the seams of the pillow area together the same way that we glued the lip on the other side and the dolly had a warm place to sleep.

Paint the Flowers on the Wall!

The other day my family and I went to our local craft store to pick up some supplies. When we were walking around, we noticed some unpainted, flower shaped peg hooks for less than a dollar each. We knew they would look great on the wall of our daughter’s room. Plus they help us keep her stuff organized! Right now she has all of her purses hanging from them. They would also be great for holding a school bag, a coat, a bath robe, etc.

This is a fun and simple project. We didn’t actually build the flowers, but we still put a little bit of our own touch on them by painting them ourselves.

And the final picture shows how cute they look on the wall!

Build a Ladder Ball Golf Game!

Here is another project for our series of how to build toys. This one is a game, one that has recently become popular under many names. I think the most commonly accepted name is ladder ball, but I have seen it referred to as Norwegian Golf, bolo ball, bola ball, hillbilly horseshoes and many others. The game consists of throwing bolas (golf balls on a rope) at a ladder structure; see the Wikipedia page for more information about ladder ball. This is another project that is built almost entirely from pvc pipe, which I find to be incredibly easy to work with and inexpensive to purchase. The project is split into two parts; in the first part, we will build the ladder structure and in the second part, we will make the balls, or bola that are thrown at the ladder structure.

How to build the ladder structure can be found here!

How to make the Bolas can be found here!

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