Skip to main content

Plastic sculptures and bath toys out of Fairy Liquid? It's Easy...


Shake it Daddy... when you're spoonfed DIY tips, you'll soon have the perfect unit for your new stereo hi-fi

It's high time that WARTE had a new featured publication and I've plumped for the DIYer's must-have read of the late 1960s, Easy. Styled as 'the magazine that pays for itself', the title is full of handy tips for the man about the house. Some projects are serious (see the desk construction sexual fantasy below), while others are just designed to make life that little bit more fun.

Why not explore 'the full potential of expanded plastics', for instance, and start making sculptures out of polystyrene? One example quoted is a model volcano that gives the 'cine enthusiast' a thrill as he plays with his railway set. Later he's shown creating a plastic swan that 'almost fooled passers-by into feeding it with bread crumbs'.

Bathtime a little bit boring? Not any more. In November 1968, writer Steve Burrows tells us how to create a 'Sub-Aqua-Observation-Craft' out of nothing more than two empty detergent bottles. Blue Peter's Valerie Singleton would no doubt have raved about the ingenuity behind this extraordinary contraption, which is joined together with plastic tubing and a number of one-and-a-half-inch wood screws.

'Release the pressure on the bottle and the diving bell will sink to the ocean depths,' writes Burrows, gushing faster than a cold tap. 'Squeeze the bottle and the bell will rise to the surface. By experimenting with ballast and pressures, a remarkably realistic degree of control can be exercised, which will probably appeal to Father as much as to the kiddies!'

The finished picture of the submersible looks very much like a Fairy Liquid bottle attached to another Fairy Liquid bottle by a bit of tubing. Roll on the 70s, when we could splash in the bath with Matey, eh?

Next time when Washed and Ready to Eat takes it Easy: how to make a ten-minute book trough.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Becoming a Twister board

I spent yesterday evening in an old factory building off Brick Lane playing kids' games with an organisation called Fun Fed. The idea is that a bunch of adults get together and act like children for a couple of hours. We played tag and stuck big coloured discs on ourselves so that we could become human Twister mats. There was an awful lot of running around and I was thinking that I ought to get to aikido a bit more often. Being a child is very hard work.
1 comment
Read more

Buttahz

Belatedly made it to the excellent Evolving English exhibition at the British Library. When I arrived, I found a curator talking to a large group of inner-city London teenagers who'd come with their school. "How do you spell Butters ?" he was asking them. The kids volunteered different spellings of the slang term. Museum man then posed another question. "But you don't actually say it like that, do you?" He was referring, I think, to the glottal stop that replaces the t in London English, although phonetics isn't my strong point. The youth were sent off to record slang in a booth for posterity and my attention was drawn to another class. This group was much younger and seemed to attend an exclusive private school. "Joanna! Come over here and listen to a bit of Romeo and Juliet!" The precocious little kids ran hither and thither, listening to samples of regional dialects on a superb interactive display or speeches from statesmen such as JFK and ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Captain Birdseye and other people of rank

Regular readers may recall that I once doubted the existence of Yeo Valley. I'd never heard of the Yeo mountain range and I therefore rated the likelihood of there being a valley at somewhere between 0 and 5%. Of course, I had yoghurt all over my face when I discovered that the place really does exist. Somewhere in Somerset, I seem to recall. Today, having read an article in the latest edition of The Marketer magazine, I'm astonished to discover that there really was a Captain Birdseye. Well, I need to qualify that just a little. There was a Mister Clarence Birdseye who invented the fish finger back in 1955. The avuncular, uniformed figure who dominated our TV screens for about thirty years may have been an invention of over-eager advertising creatives, but he didn't blow in on a trawler during a squall. There was actually some connection to a real human being. These revelations about fish and yoghurt are causing me considerable disquiet, because I'm wondering h...
3 comments
Read more