Playground Woodworking

The success of carving the wooden spoon has spurred me on to an new passion of carving.  I usually limit it to when the kids are outside playing, whittling away on my stick at the playground.  I’ve used all sorts of playground equipment to provide stabilization for sawing or leverage for cutting.  I carved two peg dolls two weeks ago and I just love them.  Seeing the transformation from an ordinary stick to something in my mind is amazing.

When I was doing the final sanding for the first peg doll (inside at night after the kids were asleep because I couldn’t wait to see how it would turn out) a bug I’ve never seen before crawled out of a hole in the bottom.  It was disgusting and unexpected.  Clearly there are things to learn about woodworking I haven’t thought about.  Andrew tried to help me get it out but no luck.  We ended up vacuuming it out and then running  a paper clip through it to make sure it was really out.  The whole memory still grosses me out.

But in the end they turned out beautifully.  Nathan loves loves loves playing with them.  I don’t trust Emily alone with them yet because she wants to use permanent marker to draw hair on them.  I’ve already made her one quickly out of a dowel that she enjoyed painting. I was hesitant to paint on faces, but I’m glad I did.  Nathan points out the eyes and mouth and knows they are little people.

Last Saturday when Andrew was gone Emily really wanted to work on a project.  I’ve been wanting to make a child size shaker inspired pegrail We found a scrap piece of wood we had used for adding pressure to the curvy boards and walked to Ace Hardware to grab a dowel.  After sanding the board  a lot – it was very rough to begin with lots of dried glue – I drilled some holes in to fit the pegs.  Nathan loved watching and Emily kindly took pictures of the process.

Emily carefully collected all of the wood shavings to play with outside.

When we went outside to play after lunch I used the swing as a brace and chiseled out the bottom of the pegs so they fit into the holes.  That lasted for about fifteen minutes until we were so cold we ran to play at a neighbors house. She kindly provided a cardboard box so I could continue chiseling away.  Before we went home for dinner all the pegs fit!

I did the final gluing, sanding and finishing on Monday night after the kids were asleep and Andrew was home.  I haven’t had a chance to hang it yet – or make the kid’s aprons to hang on it – but I absolutely love it.