Rolled newspaper tubes

A couple of weeks ago I came across a great blog called Pepper Paints. One of the projects on there uses rolled up tubes of newspaper to make a pretty sturdy structure from triangles. Couldn't resist trying it out and it was a great success with the kids and the resulting bedouin tent goes quite well with the melon box shantytown that's already in the livingroom.

Whilst we were rolling up all those tubes I thought to myself that they might make quite nifty pirate rapier type swords (kids are going through a pirate phase right now), so I taped the end of one back on itself and slid on an oval of cardboard with a hole in it, then taped on a little strip of card at the bottom of the blade to hold the guard in place.

They seem to work rather well in that they have stood up to a fair bit of battling without falling to bits and yet the kids have been unable to seriously maim each other with them, because if you hit too hard then the paper blade just buckles and because the paper is rolled on the diagonal, the end of the sword isnt many layers of paper and so you can't really poke anyone hard with it either. I like them because they look really cute though.