What unusual toys (not necessarily real toys) did you play with as a child?

@Mz_Lizzy “I played with a mop and pretended it was a person.” That’s not freaky! It’s imaginative.

Well, I had a few beloved toys when I was a kid, like a set of bright colored rods and wheels for building and a brown bear with a cassette player in its belly that played stories. But I spent most of my time as a kid reading and crafting. I loved to sew, make things with modeling clay, learn origami shapes, things like that. My sister and I learned how to make cold-process soap and we also had a rock tumbler and a set of tools for wire wrapping. My dad and my grandma used to collect rocks and fossils, so we had a pretty bitchin’ collection of geodes and shark’s teeth, neat things like that. Actually, now that I think about it most of the stuff that comes to mind is thanks to my grandma, she really got us kids into all this creative stuff.

I made a doll out of hay when I was four. We were very poor, so it wasn’t really unusual to me at the time. I still have it too!

Oh wow, I just remembered that I used to set up a bunch of dining room chairs in front of a big easy chair in our living room, then, I would string ribbons (reins) through the chairs and put an ottoman on top of the big chair and VIOLA! I had a STAGECOACH! lol

I also used to ‘ride’ our backyard gate. I would put a towel on the gate, it was about 6 feet tall and would pretend I was riding a horse.

I was an imaginative kid, and, it was the 60’s. Watch Bonanza and make a stagecoach. haha

Played with anything in sight [ even those things we couldn’t move very easy ] because toys were rare. Not that rare but it was hard to keep them in good shape… we didn’t know how to take good care of them so we basically played with all what we found.

I remember we used to collect a lot of metal balls from near train tracks [ we had several tracks near the place were we grew up ] Used to take old coins and put them on the tracks and let trains pass over them… man it was fun to get a coin like of aluminium :P

Used to make swords out on christmas trees when we threw them out.

We made some sort of barracks out of wood and cardboard.

Gosh… would take me a long time to say all of these.

It’s not really a toy exactly but we used to play with a concoction of corn starch that my mother make up for us. It’s actually very cool stuff. Very tactile. The viscosity or whatever is very strange. My mom also used to make another concoction from Fels Naptha soap flakes but I don’t remember exactly what that was all about. My parents were both chemists and mathematicians so my brother and played with some very weird shit and some very weird concepts when we were growing up. We decorated our Christmas tree with Mobius strip garlands and when my mom tried to explain to me, at the age of about 6, that if I tried to walk across the kitchen, and each step was exactly half the size of my previous step that I would never actually get to the other side of the kitchen, well, that just messed with my 6 year old mind. I think she should have waited until I was a little bit older before laying that WTF on my little brain.

Firecracker rockets, we would take a pie tin put about an inch of water into it, and old soup or metal can, aluminum was to weak, punch a hole in the end big enough for a firecracker and cut the other end off, stick the open in into the water light the firecracker and run; firecreacker pops and the can goes flying about 30ft in the air. Ah the good old times…..

Wow can you imagine kids these days being allowed to play with those @Hypocrisy_Central. I can imagine the fun they were though. Same goes for @Hibernate playing near the rail tracks.

@Coloma That stagecoach is such an awesome idea! It’s so creative.

@lillycoyote I remember that corn starch… stuff. We had it in a ziploc bag. When you squeeze it, it feels solid, but when you let it go it runs like a liquid. I think that has something to do with the polymers in there?

I had some toys, a Barbie head where you can do her hair and make-up. And, a mini hotel with a revolving door at the front, I loved that. But mostly I played outside. Bicycle riding, swinging and flipping on monkey bars, climbinh trees, swiming in the summer time, tennis. When I was not active I played cards or scrabble (started playing scrabble around age 8).

I found this strange looking object in my mum’s bedroom. It was long & had little things protruding out from the sides. I used it as a cactus, placed the thing next to my cowboy figures & train track, for that authentic frontier look you know? I named it Percy the Prick, trouble was it kept “shivering” & falling over. Must have been too cold for the poor thing. Happy days :¬)

When I was little, we had an ottoman that had a wooden base and legs, with a soft upholstered top. I would turn it upside down and sit in it, and it was a boat. I was small enough that rocking from side to side would rock the whole ottoman!

My favourite thing was a blackboard that my Gramps made for my sister when I was born. She was 7 and needed something special to show her that everyone still loved her :)
It was an easel-style chalkboard painted red, with the alphabet stenciled along the top. The coolest toy for a little girl who loved to play “school”!

OK, I’m not proud of this, but we played cripple using croquet mallets fro crutches.

My folks got a new fridge and my sister and I played in that box for days. Dad sat it out back and we cut a door in it and windows. We colored on it. It was the greatest thing ever, until it rained. Dad hauled it off after that.

My sister loved to play with a tape measure, the kind a seamstress uses. She would sit there for hours and roll it up perfectly and unroll it and start over. She has very shaky hands and it always drove me crazy, but she loved that thing.

There were forts made out of the living room sofa and chairs, cushions, and blankets. Our parents had a clothes chute that had three openings…one on each floor. When friends came over, we’d each take a floor and build a ‘home’ near each chute and then converse through the openings.

Grammy took two metal chocolate boxes and filled them with costume jewelry and hid them in their huge house. When the grandchildren came to visit, we would hunt for them. One became the boys’ box and one belonged to the girls. The goal was to find the other team’s treasure box and hide it from them. It became pretty cutthroat. When Grammy died, we took one of the boxes, and I passed the tradition on to my nieces and nephews by hiding it at their grandmother’s house.

Small, fist sized, clumps of soil. I pretended they were space ships. You could smash them to bits every day and there were always more to use…excuse me while I just pop out into the garden for a couple of hours.

While our house was being built, my brother and I spent hours playing on the piles of dirt playing with the way gravity separated the smaller clumps of dirt from the larger by the way they rolled down the sides. We pretended to make a dry sluice to separate out the powder and pretended they were gold. even painted it.

I was spidey. But with a cape. Plus silly string.

I had a HUGE collection of model horses and played with them constantly. My friends and I built entire towns out of boxes for these horses and furnished them with (mostly) Barbie accessories. The coolest toy I had was a Heinz pickle swing. It was just an outdoor swing that hung from a tree branch, but the seat was a big green plastic pickle emblazoned with “Heinz”. LOVED that swing.

We used to make French arrows & would have hours of fun throwing them into the air, competition was very fierce as to who could throw their arrow the furthest……. :-/

A French arrow?

Me and one of my friends were both horse-mad, and my house had quite a large garden, so we would set up show-jumping courses using any old planks and sticks we could find, and then gallop around it pretending to be on horseback.

Oh @Seelix, you reminded me of my grandmother’s stool! It was a brown WOODEN stool and we would turn it upside down and it was a boat or on its side it was a car or on a horse. It was a fantastic toy that all of her grandkids played with at some point or another.

Me and my siblings would turn all the chairs upside down and then get a sheet to put it over them to make a tent. Then we used to have picnics and pretend we were camping. XD

My imaginary friend, that I only talked to and played with in the bathtub. I think he was a perv!

@queenie I still make forts (that’s what we call them) with my boys, they are 16 and 13 lol.

@seazen_

yep, French arrows….. ;-)

@queenie – why not get all you siblings together this summer and turn chairs upside down and cover them with a sheet. Have a picnic and pretend you are children again! I think I’ll do that with my own siblings. Sounds like fun!