Croquet Set (requires parent/guardian help)
Plastic flamingos (left over from our awesome auction!)
Rust-Oleum Painter’s Touch Spray Paint in white, and other colors as desired
Use a spade drill bit to drill a hole in the top and bottom of the plastic flamingo. The size of the hole should correspond with the size of the wooden dowels you are using as the croquet mallet handles. The wooden dowels I used were ⅝-in. in diameter. For my drill bit, I used the Bosch Spade Drill bit set, which comes with lots of sizes to choose from.
Once you’ve drilled the holes, slide the dowel through the plastic flamingo.
Next, cut a 2-in. diameter wooden dowel down to a 10-in. length. This will create the head of the croquet mallet.
Note: You can also use your hand saw to saw off the piece of plastic on the belly of each flamingo. This piece of plastic is intended to hold the wire legs in place, but we won’t be using those.
Again using a spade drill bit that corresponds to the diameter of the mallet handle, drill a hole into the middle of the mallet head.
Do not drill all the way through the mallet head. Half-way through is sufficient.
Squeeze wood glue into the hole, then place the mallet handle into the hole and allow the glue to dry overnight.
To create the wicket hoops for the croquet game, you can use the wire that comes along with the plastic lawn flamingos! Gotta love that right? Just bend them into a U-shape.
Since I don’t have a soil lawn where I can place the U-shape wire, I came up with another solution for getting them to stand up.
Simply take a 1-in. square wooden dowel and cut it down to 3-4-in. strips. Drill a small hole in each cut and use those holes to hold up the U-shaped wire.
Last, you’ll want to give your croquet mallets a dose of color.
First, I spray painted the mallet head with white spray paint. I then taped off two stripes on the head and spray painted the entire mallet in a few vibrant colors. Rust-Oleum’s Painter’s Touch spray paint is my favorite. It has a primer in it so you only need one coat!
To create the croquet balls, I used a little creative license. Since we don’t own any actual croquet balls, I spray painted a few lacrosse balls that we had. I’m not sure why we had them. No one around here plays lacrosse.
