This milk carton sailboat or rather milk carton schooner was so hard to photograph as the minute I placed it into the pool it started sailing off into the wild blue yonder! That means that if you get a bunch of kids together to make milk carton sailboats they really could have races, how fun is that?
I had dreamed of photographing this little boat with some playmobile people inside, or maybe even our pet hamster (good thing I didn't actually do that!) but just getting these photos took more time than I actually had, so maybe next time when I can get together a whole regatta there will be more time for photos.
You'll Need:
- a milk carton
- duck tape (optional)
- electrical tape
- a flat wooden skewer for the mast
- round wooden skewers for the sails
- a wine cork or piece of modeling clay
- something to make sails, either fabric, or thin plastic, or in my case a mylar bag that held the cheerios!
- a hot glue gun
How To Make A Milk carton Sailboat:
- Using a sharp knife carefully puncture a hole in the least attractive panel of the milk carton, and then using scissors carefully remove this panel. For this boat I removed the entire panel, for smaller sailboats one may choose to remove only half of this panel, as the boat may only have an deck on half of it.
- Cover the sides of the boat with duct tape and add stripes with electrical tape.
- Make a mast with a wine cork base and a flat wooden skewer, and affiix to the bottom of the boat with hot glue, re-enforced with duct tape (my mast fell over after the boat sailed around a bit, but could be I just didn't use enough hot glue)
- Make two cross bars for the sails from smaller skewers, and glue the sails to the cross bars. My sails were made from a mylar cereal bag and decorated with tape. Glue the sails to the mast with hot glue.
- Add a flag to the top of your mast (mine is striped electrical tape) and you are ready to set sail!
Hope you enjoy this fun project, and if you decide to take your boat for a sail somewhere other than a contained pool, do attach a string to it so it won't sail off never to return!
