DIY bird toy #1

Always start with the finished thing:

I thought I get into making some bird toys for my little friend. Saves a lot of money and gives me a neat little craft to do. I had some pictures in mind but no real idea how the whole thing will work in the end. As it turns out, nothing really worked as I initially imagines.

I thought a good start would be some popsicle sticks. On their own they are a little blunt, so I was told to try food colouring to make them optically more appealing.

I have no idea what appropriate amounts of food colouring are, so I just slammed some drops into a few bowls and let the sticks soak for 24 hours.





The result was kind off disappointing.

I think I overestimated the effect of food colouring and will have to quadruple the amount to get a reasonable result. Red turned out decent, but the rest ist just embarrassing.

I thought I can use hemp rope to connect popsicle sticks in different orientations to make a fun toy. Being the crafting genius that I am, I only realised half way into my project that I do not own a drill. So getting sticks onto the rope was a challenge. My first attempt was to just make a cross and try to tie the rope around it.

Doing that twice would leave some room in the middle to put a nice toilet paper roll. Looked so good in my head...

As it turns out, getting the second cross of sticks on top of the toilet paper roll was a little too hard for me and my mediocre knotting skills. So I had to go to plan B...

In the meantime, I cut some strips out of crafting paper, which I used to fill the toilet paper roll (hence the need of getting the second cross of sticks tightly against the paper roll).

To make it all work I resorted to just sticking the popsicle sticks through holes made in the paper roll. Now you can barely see them anymore, but they nicely hold the paper strips inside. The bird can reach in between the popsicle sticks at the top or the bottom, or through of the additional holes I cut into the side of the paper tube.





Doing this again twice left me with the result you can see here:

I varied the way I attached the rolls to the rope. I want to say because I want to give a variety to my bird, but honestly I just winged it and did what felt funny at the moment.

The middle roll was emptied of its paper strips in just one day. The rest are holding up a little better. So far he only nibbled at the paper rolls. I thought he would destroy them more actively and increase the hole size. We see how it will look in a week.