The children's kraft shop

FOREWORD TO MOTHERS

Reading edition

Introducing the Children’s Kraftshop. We have endeavored to open a new and useful field of simple handicrafts for little folk, giving them an original line of toys and a new line of materials with which to make them. We hope the children will have a great deal of pleasure in making toys of such things as empty spools, sticks of kindling wood, wooden clothespins, natural twigs, old envelopes and newspapers, and in this way to encourage resourcefulness, originality, inventiveness, and the power to do with supplies at hand.

Everything described in the book has been invented by the author, and made by such practical and simple methods that a child’s mind can grasp them, and a child’s hands be easily trained to manufacture the articles.

Vintage line illustration by Adelia Belle Beard featuring a young girl and boy testing a homemade toy. The girl, in a pink dress and hair bow, stands holding a taut string threaded through four red cardboard discs. On the ground, a boy kneels beside a small toy boat on wheels with two paper sails. The artist's signature is in the bottom right corner.