Blowguns and Bouncing Pigs: Traditional Toymaking: The Foxfire Americana Library (6) Read online

  ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, SEPTEMBER 2011

  Copyright © 1980 by the Foxfire Fund, Inc.

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Originally published in Foxfire 6, © 1980 by The Foxfire Fund, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-94825-0

  v3.1

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Ball and Cup

  Blowgun

  Bouncing Pig

  Bow and Arrow

  Bubble Blower

  Bull Grinder

  Button on a String

  Climbing Bear

  Corn Guns

  Cornstalk Animals

  Cornstalk Fiddle

  Apple-head Dolls

  Cucumber Dolls

  Other Dolls

  Dumb Bell

  Dumb Bell or Bull Roarer or Buzzer

  Fluttermill

  Fly Gun

  Flying Jenny or Merry-go-round

  Furniture

  Hoops

  Jumping Jack

  Kicking Mule

  Limberjack or Dancing Dolls

  Pop Guns

  Puzzles

  Rattletrap

  Rolling Clown

  Sling Shots

  Smoke Grinders

  Squirt Guns

  Stick Horses

  Stilts

  Grapevine Swings

  Rope Swings

  Tops or Dancers

  Whimmy Diddles or Jeep Sticks

  Hollow Whistles

  Split Whistles

  Whittled Animals

  A NOTE ABOUT THE FOXFIRE AMERICANA LIBRARY SERIES

  For almost half a century, high school students in the Foxfire program in Rabun County, Georgia, have collected oral histories of their elders from the southern Appalachian region in an attempt to preserve a part of the rapidly vanishing heritage and dialect. The Foxfire Fund, Inc., has brought that philosophy of simple living to millions of readers, starting with the bestselling success of The Foxfire Book in the early 1970s. Their series of fifteen books and counting has taught creative self-sufficiency and has preserved the stories, crafts, and customs of the unique Appalachian culture for future generations.

  Traditionally, books in the Foxfire series have included a little something for everyone in each and every volume. For the first time ever, through the creation of The Foxfire Americana Library, this forty-five-year collection of knowledge has been organized by subject. Whether down-home recipes or simple tips for both your household and garden, each book holds a wealth of tried-and-true information, all passed down by unforgettable people with unforgettable voices.

  ILLUSTRATION 1 Mr. Davis glues the cup to the stick.

  TOYS

  Ball and Cup

  ARTHUR DAVIS: I haven’t been making these all my life and I don’t know anything about their history. It’s a good game, though. If you practice a while, you can get pretty good at it.

  The pieces are whittled out of mountain laurel or rhododendron, but you could use other kinds. The handles and the cups are glued together, and I make the balls out of pine wood. But you can use whatever you have. The main idea is to swing the stick with one hand so the ball drops into the cup without touching it with the other hand.

  ILLUSTRATION 2 The finished toy.

  ILLUSTRATION 3

  Blowgun

  ERNEST FRANKLIN: Take a hollow weed, or something that doesn’t have any sections in it like bamboo, and cut a piece of it anywhere from four to six feet long. That makes your gun.

  For the darts, we’d take a round piece of hickory about 3/16 inch in diameter and sharpen one end and put it in the fire and temper it a little bit. Then we’d take a squirrel’s tail and cut about a third of it off and fasten that on the other end of your hickory dart. Then you stick that dart in the hollow weed and blow up a storm!

  Bouncing Pig

  One of the toys Willard Watson makes is called a bouncing pig. A rod runs through the front feet of the pig so that its hindquarters are free to rise up and down. As the crank at the back end of the toy is turned, the man’s right arm moves up and down to whip the pig, and each time the pig is whipped, its hindquarters rise off the platform (the man’s left leg moves forward, and a rod connected to his left foot and left hand causes his left hand to rise; a rod connecting his left hand and the pig’s hindquarters pulls the hindquarters into the air).

  Bow and Arrow

  LAWTON BROOKS: We made bows and arrows out of hickory wood. We’d take a springy sapling or branch for a bow, shape it right with a knife and put little notches in the ends, and string it with a string. We’d make arrows out of shorter pieces—straight as we could get them. We took umbrella staves one time and made spikes [for the arrows] out of them. We’d tore up somebody’s umbrella, got the spikes out of it, and put them in the arrows to kill rabbits, birds, things like that.

  LELIA GIBSON: My brother would get a piece of wood, a green sapling—it had to be green so it would bend. He’d cut it to the right length, and string a cord on that. Then he’d get a straight stick [for the arrow] and he’d go to the fields and find stones—old arrowheads the Indians had made—and tie that on the end of the arrow. If they couldn’t find arrowheads, they’d use a big twenty-penny nail, but I don’t recall now how they fixed that nail on the end of the arrow. They could make the arrows stick into trees.

  ILLUSTRATION 4 Willard Watson’s bouncing pig.

  HATTIE KENNY: Arrows were made out of sourwood that grows up in the spring. Let ’em stand over the winter and cut ’em to make your arrows.

  BUCK CARVER: For the bows we’d use hickory or white-oak saplings. Instead of string we’d use what they called whang leather, which was strips of ground-hog hide. Then we’d wire or tie a nail up in a straight stick for an arrow.

  EDD HODGINS: We used string out of cottonseed meal sacks for the string. That’s about all the string we ever got when I was little.

  Bubble Blower

  LELIA GIBSON: We used to get an old sewing-thread spool, take some soap, and make a lather in water. We’d [dip one end of the spool in the lather] and blow through the other end and make bubbles. They’d be different colors. They’d be red, pink, blue—all colors.

  Bull Grinder

  DAVE PICKETT: The Ozark bull grinder was something people say started in the Ozarks. Of course, bull grinders ain’t the only name it had. I’ve heard them called do nothings and smoke grinders. I call them bull grinders because the guy I got the pattern from, that’s what he called it. I asked for his permission to use the label off the back of his and I just changed it a little bit. It’s a little toy that’s good for absolutely nothing except for passifying oneself with something to do other than twiddling his thumbs. I put a label on the back to tell people just what it is: It’s for people going either direction, cutting red tape, breaking conversation ice, relieving nervous tension, advanced stages of thumb twiddling, sharpening dull conversations, a reducing gear for big wheels. The world’s most useless necessity is made of selected pieces of well-seasoned out-house wood by retired moonshiners.

  ILLUSTRATION 5 First Dave cuts strips off a poplar board at a 15° angle for the pistons.

  ILLUSTRATION 6 He then cuts the pistons into 1¼″ lengths.

  ILLUSTRATION 7 The handles a
re made of poplar cut 3/8″ square and 4¼″ long.

  ILLUSTRATION 8 Holes are drilled through the center of each piston, and two holes are drilled 1¼″ apart through the handles to attach the pistons to.

  ILLUSTRATION 9 A 3/8″ dovetail router is used to cut two channels into each 3″ square block.

  ILLUSTRATION 10 The toy ready for assembly.

  ILLUSTRATION 11 Dave puts wax on the pistons to reduce friction and keep them from binding, then he screws a bead into the handle for ease in turning. Last, he sets the two pistons into the channels cut in the block and attaches the handle. The screws are left loose so the pistons and arm turn freely (left), ILLUSTRATION 12 As the handle is turned, the pistons slide back and forth in their respective channels (right).

  ILLUSTRATION 13

  ILLUSTRATION 14 Florence threads a piece of thread 36″ long through two holes of a button and ties the ends together to form a loop.

  Button on a String

  FLORENCE BROOKS: We used to make these when we were little girls. We’d play spin the button. You move your thumbs in and out to make it whiz. We used to get them tangled in each other’s hair and have fights doing that. We did it just to be mean. We played with them until we wore out the string, then we’d go make us another one or tie the one we had back together. The first person I ever saw make one was my mother.

  HATTIE KENNY: You broke you a string as long as you wanted it and you put it in the eyes [of the button] crossways and then you tied the ends together to make the string form a loop with the button in the center. Then you put your thumbs in there and start turning it round and round and round till it was wound up. Then start and it would just “zip” until it broke the string in two. Makes the funniest noise!

  ILLUSTRATION 15 As she increases and then releases the tension in the string, the button spins, making a whistling noise.

  Churning Woman

  On a recent visit to the Bakersville, North Carolina, area, Harvey Miller showed us a sixty-year-old handmade toy he owns. As a wooden crank on the side of the box is turned, the woman’s right arm moves up and down, as does the churn dasher attached to the woman’s hand.

  ILLUSTRATION 16 The woman is mounted on a chestnut box. Her body is carved out of wood. The end of the crank that operates the toy is visible (arrow).

  ILLUSTRATION 17 The wooden crank, carved with a pocket knife.

  ILLUSTRATION 18 We removed the bottom panel in order to see how the toy operated.

  ILLUSTRATION 19

  Climbing Bear

  DAVE PICKETT: The climbing bear is a derivative of a Swiss toy. Sometime in the early eighteenth century, a Swiss toy maker made a little man, and it climbed up a string and worked on the same principle. And he was called a climbing Swiss. And when the Swiss people immigrated to this country, there were no similar mountains in this country to climb. So they made what did climb. They made a bear. Some of the Swiss have immigrated to some of the islands, and I’ve seen monkeys made the same way, squirrels—just about anything that climbed you could adapt to this principle.

  The way it works is one side holds while the other side catches the higher hold. It climbs one side while the other side alternately holds.

  I usually make them this size. The thing about a bear any bigger than the one I make is that you take a kid two or three years old, and he’s standing under it, and he makes that bear climb and he turns it loose, and it’s heavy enough that if it fell and hit him in the head, it would hurt him. And that’s the reason I keep the bear small. If it did fall, it wouldn’t hurt him.

  There was a guy came here a couple years ago. One of the representatives of the Stanley Tool Company. He wanted to know if he couldn’t have a pattern of this climbing bear to make some. So I said, “Fine.” I gave him the pattern, and I saw him three weeks later.

  He said, “You know, I made about fifty of those bears and not a one would climb.”

  And I said, “What did you do? Drill the holes straight through?”

  And he said, “Yeah.”

  I said, “No wonder it wouldn’t climb.” Then I explained how the holes in the arms have to be drilled [see ILLUSTRATION 21].

  ILLUSTRATION 20 Dave makes the bear climb by alternately pulling on one, then the other string.

  ILLUSTRATION 21

  ILLUSTRATION 22 Buck Carver’s corn gun.

  Corn Guns

  BUCK CARVER: We had another toy we made with big spools. It had a big opening that would hold a grain of corn or a pea or a bean. Well, we’d take a little carpet tack and tack this rubber band around. We had a plunger in back and this rubber band came around it. We had a little slot in the plunger so the band would hold in the slot. Then we’d put a pea or a grain of corn in there and flip it with that plunger and it’d send it a pretty good ways. We had a kind of corn with little old slick, hard kernels, and that stuff would whack pretty good in those little old corn guns.

  Cornstalk Animals

  ERNEST FRANKLIN: There’s nothing to them. Take one piece of a cornstalk for the body, then take another stalk and split strips off the outside for the legs and the neck. Then make the head and tail from other pieces. Kids would play with those lots.

  MRS. RAE SHOOK: We used to make horses and sheep out of cornstalks. They’d have long legs and necks. The head would be made from the hard outside of the cornstalk. The body, ears, and face would be made out of the stalk, too. Everything was made from the stalk.

  ILLUSTRATION 23

  Cornstalk Fiddle

  MRS. TOM MACDOWELL: We’d take a cornstalk outside and strip and split it and then fix the bow and we’d just squeak and play.

  EDD HODGINS: Yeah, I’ve made a thousand of ’em. Just cut off two joints out of a cornstalk and use one for the bow and one for the fiddle. Sometimes when they go to gettin’ dry, you can spit on them and make ’em squeal real big.

  HARLEY THOMAS: There’s nothing to it. You just make your little strings and make your little bridge and there’s your fiddle. We used a resined stick for our fiddle bows, but you can use a real fiddle bow or a cornstalk one, too. My mother used to make two cornstalk fiddles and use one for the fiddle and one for the bow.

  ILLUSTRATION 24 Harley first decides which part of the stalk he will use.

  ILLUSTRATION 25 He selects a two-joint section of the stalk and trims off any ends of leaves, or pieces of foreign matter.

  ILLUSTRATION 26 Next he decides which section to use for the “stringed” portion, and, with a pencil, outlines the areas to be cut away.

  ILLUSTRATION 27 Then he begins to cut, first slicing away the excess stalk that lies underneath what will become the “strings.”

  ILLUSTRATION 28 After cutting out the excess stalk between the “strings,” he fashions a tiny bridge out of scrap wood.

  ILLUSTRATION 29 The finished fiddle.

  ILLUSTRATION 30 Richard Henslee tries playing the fiddle using one of Harley’s fiddle bows …

  ILLUSTRATION 31 … and so does Harley.

  ILLUSTRATION 32

  Crossbow

  LAWTON BROOKS: I used to make an old wooden crossbow. I’d get a plank and saw it out like the stock of a gun, make a bow like for a plain bow, and mount the bow crosswise to the gun stock at the front. Then I’d string the bow and make a trigger in the gun stock to hold the string back, set my arrow in the bow, and pull the string back ready to shoot the arrow. The trigger’d hold the string ready to shoot till I pulled it, and then it’d shoot the arrow.

  STANLEY HICKS: We’d make crossbows. Hickory is the best wood for the bow, but white oak will work, too. We’d hew the arrows out round and just leave the ends flat if we were going to practice. If we were hunting, we’d take a .22-cartridge hull and drive a sharpened nail through its end from the inside and then mount that hull on the end of our arrow. That made a good one.

  Apple-head Dolls

  LOLA CANNON: [Some girls may have had apple-head dolls] but I didn’t know about them when I was growing up. But I know how to make them. You peel an a
pple, and while the apple is fresh you shape features on it with a teaspoon. And then the best part is to string them up with a string through the center. In a dry, airy place hang them up and let them shrivel. When they shrivel, the features you have made are still there. You put in tiny sequins or something for the eyes and little pearl beads for the teeth. The texture of the dried apple looks like a real old person’s skin. They’re really interesting. I expect they’d last a long time. If you got one wet, I imagine it’d lose its shape. You see a lot of them in the craft shops and such places.

  MRS. MARGARET OWENS: [Mrs. Owens began making apple-head dolls to sell through area craft shops nearly ten years ago. She modified several old patterns and came up with her own designs, but the methods she uses are typical.]

  I know very little of the history of apple-head dolls. I read in a book when I first started making them that they originated in colonial times. The mothers would peel apples and pinch a nose and poke at the eyes every day or so until they finally had a face and the apple was dry. When I first started, I tried it that way, but it just didn’t look like a face, so I began to carve them. It took a long time for me to get one right on the first try.

  ILLUSTRATION 33 Margaret first peels the apple with a thin, sharp knife, leaving only the skin around the stem. She shapes the face with the knife by cutting indentations for eyes and cutting into cheeks, thus forming the nose. She uses Golden Delicious apples, and she dips the whole apple in lemon juice to keep it from turning brown. As the apple dries, it shrinks and takes on an aged appearance and individuality. After the apple is completely dry she decides whether it will be a man or a woman. Then she shapes the face by pinching and poking and perhaps snipping off the nose a little.