For quite some time now, I’ve been wanting to teach my niece how to play pick-up-sticks. I remember the simple game from childhood as being easy to transport, easy to play, and lots of fun. I knew it would be a great tool for building her dexterity, as well. The idea of possibly making my own set had been in the back of my mind for months until Jo and I encountered the Mrs. Butterworth’s bottle recycling contest that Jo told you about a couple of weeks ago. The bottle would make such a fun container for the game!

The game itself was really easy to make. I started with some nice, thick, round bamboo skewers. I had 12″ skewers and they were pointy on one end, so I used my trusty branch pruner to cut the pointy end off of 30 of them and trim them to 8″ in length.

Then I used regular craft paint to paint the sticks in the following proper colors: 1 black, 7 red, 7 blue, 7 yellow, and 8 green (per the rules). Rather than mess with brushes, I took the easier (and more fun) approach and just put on a disposale glove and dipped my finger in the paint and smeared it all over the sticks. It only took a few minutes to paint them all, and after drying for a short time on some waxed paper, they were ready to go.

With the sticks done, it was time to move on to the container. I took an empty, clean Mrs. Buttworth’s syrup bottle and removed all the labels. Then I made my own new labels — one for the front with the name of the game, and one for the back with the rules for gameplay. I made a downloadable for you guy sin case you wanted to print some labels, too.

Download our free Pick-Up Sticks label template

After I printed them, I wanted to laminate the labels so they would last longer. You can use clear Con-Tact paper or any other laminating material to do this, but I chose to use regular 2″ wide packing tape, because it was handy. After covering the labels with tape, I cut them out and used double-sided tape to stick them to the front and back of the bottle.

I’m delighted with how this game turned out. My niece really loves it, too, and totes the bottle back and forth to Grandma’s house. She’s not quite ready for the official rules and scoring process, but she’s quite good at picking up the sticks without moving the others, so it’s a lot of fun for us to play together.

She also really likes to use her imagination with the sticks and do other things like spell out letters and play her favorite made-up game: “Stick world”.