The Longest Shortest Time

5 Gifts You Could Buy…Or Make Out of Garbage

One of my favorite memories of being a kid is the day my mom and I found my play stove. And I mean literally. In the garbage. We lived in Brooklyn at the time, and on the very same sidewalk where I was trained to look out for dog poop (or to pull down my pants and squat in an emergency), my mom spotted it: an old, dirty wooden stove with fading orange paint spirals for burners. “We need this,” she said.

I’m pretty sure she hid the stove somewhere nearby so my dad could come get it later and carry it up to our third floor walkup. Over the next few days I helped her sand down the wood. When the splinters were gone she stained and varnished it. That stove is probably the toy I played with most in my preschool years.

Now, as a parent, I share my mom’s pride in turning trash into toys. My best dumpster find: a vintage Fisher Price Little People Main Street. (Sorry, husband, for embarrassing you while I dove into the neighbor’s trashcan to fish out the people!) I also find that lots of Sasha’s go-to toys are made from actual trash. Here’s a list of my top garbagey toys, with retail equivalents—because, y’know, I get that it’s weird to put a bow on a garbage heap.

1. Cardboard Box
Classic garbage-turned-toy, we’ve made boxes and toilet paper rolls into spaceships, boats, binoculars, telescopes, helmets, and puppet theaters. If you’re looking for cardboard you can actually gift, Flatout Frankie makes these cool planes, cars, and stoves.

Flatout-Frankie-airplane-scaled

2. Chinese Takeout Condiment Packets
When Sasha was just old enough to pull herself up and dig through kitchen drawers, I accidentally discovered that she is CRAZY about Chinese condiment packets. She loved how they sounded when she squeezed them; she loved to toss them like beanbags; and most of all she loved to use them as money in her toy cash register (she would’ve eaten paper money, so we kept that hidden from her). Chinese condiments usually come in three varieties: soy sauce, duck sauce, and mustard. So you can easily turn them into a sorting game by color. Or you can buy an actual sorting game, like this one by Melissa and Doug. Another great sorting toy: TOMY’s Little Chirpers Eggs.

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3. Crumpled Up Paper
I’ve got a ton of scrap paper lying around, from old podcast scripts to old drafts of novels. And that paper sits in a stack in my office that we used to call RECYCLING but we now call SASHA’S PAPER. Sasha likes to crumple it up and have “snowball fights.” She also enjoys doing this with leftover tissue paper from gift bags. The highbrow equivalent? Origami. Last year, during all of the snowstorms, I pulled up some of Tavin15’s YouTube tutorials, which I discovered on the fabulous The Kid Should See This. Sasha loved following along with the instructions. And then she quickly moved on to making her own unidentifiable objects—like any good Origami master, she teaches me the folds as we go. If you want a book from an actual master, Nick Robinson’s Absolute Beginner’s Origami and Paul Jackson’s Origami Zoo are great places to start.

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4. Odd + Ends from Your Junk Drawer
You know those extra buttons from your shirts and jackets that you keep around just in case? And then “just in case” never comes? Those buttons are great for making necklaces, collages, and pushing into clay sculptures. All kinds of odd and ends are good for this kind of thing: caps from dried-out pens, cut-up straws, those pieces of uncooked macaroni that landed on the floor. All you need to turn this junk into jewelry is a piece of string. But if you want to make a stellar sculpture, use a molding clay called Model Magic. My mom is an art teacher, and she uses this stuff all the time. It comes in colors, but my mom likes the white because you can paint it. Model Magic is even reusable if you put it back in the pouch before it dries. See one of my favorite sculptures Sasha made with Model Magic and junk drawer goodies here, along with my mom’s other favorite art supplies for little kids, which put together would make a nice gift pack for any budding artist.

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5. Yard Waste
Sasha loves to collect stuff from outside—pine needles, twigs, acorns, dried leaves and flower petals—and bring them inside. Mostly, it’s just about making piles of loot. But sometimes she likes to arrange the things on the kitchen counter to look like faces. Which the cat then promptly scatters all over the house. A much cleaner way to play that game is with these lovely About Face by cards from Eeboo. There are a ton of ways to use the cards, but here are a couple of our favorites: 1) build the ugliest face in the world and 2) build a face that looks like someone we know. When we play the latter, we like to take a picture of the face and text it to the person. They usually agree that it looks like them!

Eboo-about-face-scaled

What are YOUR favorite toys made from garbage?
More ideas, please! In the comments.

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