School: Oldtown (roll number 7470)
- Location:
- Oldtown, Co. Dublin
- Teacher: M. Ní Ruanaidhe
Archival Reference
The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0787, Page 39
Image and data © National Folklore Collection, UCD.
See copyright details.
DownloadOpen data
Available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
- XML School: Oldtown
- XML Page 39
- XML “Homemade Toys”
Note: We will soon deprecate our XML Application Programming Interface and a new, comprehensive JSON API will be made available. Keep an eye on our website for further details.
On this page
- Young girls take great delight in gathering flowers. When they have them gathered they string them together and make chains and girdles. They make dolls from rags and old clothes. They wound the rags together like a doll. Boys made tops and whips out of wood. They got a bit of twine or a rope on to it and they made a whip.People used to make faces of men and women out of turnips. They can cut eyes, ears and noses out in the turnips. They can also cut the pulp out of the turnips and put candles lighting into it.My mother when she was small used to make a whistle from a tall herb called a kice. She cut a hole in it and put a piece of wood inside fora tongue and six holes to work her fingers on to make it whistle.Another toy she made was to root a briar and dress the root of it and make a pipe of it. She had to scoop the root of the briar and make it the shape of the head of a pipe and get and ash stick and pare it for the shank and it makes a lovely pipe.Another old toy was Crow Mill made out of a piece of tin and a hole in the centre of it. She stuck a hole in the ground and the wind would whirl it up an down.The girls make necklaces from daisies when they are in bloom. They also make dolls. This is how to make them. Take some wool and wind it round your hand till it is thick enough to make the dolls body. Slip it off your hand and tie a piece of wool around it about half an inch down. This will form the head.(continues on next page)
