Craft and Games as Infants: PART ONE
For most of our play-time, my siblings and I would entertain ourselves, but sometimes on wet days Mum would get out art and craft things for us to do. Our paints were old watercolours in a large tin, purchased at a local jumble sale. We would have water in a jam-jar or old meat paste jar and paint anything we liked. I did try painting in a favourite colouring book about elves, pixies and fairies, but I discovered it would ruin the picture on the reverse, so I didn’t do it again! We would sometimes try and copy pictures from books, until one disastrous day I knocked over the jam-jar of water all over a book! 😊
Once, Mum cut us half a potato each and with a blunt knife, we were allowed to cut out a shape, such as a triangle or square. We would happily make prints in various colours across the page. Then in Autumn, we did leaf prints. We would coat the back of the leaves, where the veins protruded with paint and press hard on to the page. The knack was not to use too much paint. I was fascinated with the effect.
My scrap book was one of my favourite activities. We would cut out pictures from old magazines and stick them in with flour and water paste, which acted as a glue. The pictures were not always special, because they were magazines for adults, but it didn’t seem to matter. On one of my pages, I had a red sports car and a plate of baked beans on toast! We also used this flour and water type glue for our Brook Bond Tea cards. We had different books for all the categories, like cars, flowers, trees, and people. I still have some of them, but we hardly ever completed a whole book. On some of the cards I can still see the white caked flour and water paste oozing out from the sides. All these decades later, the glue of the flour and water paste is still steadfast! 😊
