Quest to Trap the Leprechaun

We have been talking about leprechaun at our house for years, but we have never tried to trap the leprechaun that keeps coming up in the stories I tell JDaniel. That is until this year. This year we created a leprechaun trap to see if there might really be one in our town.

We dug through our recycling bin to find the perfect box to use for the trap and came upon an old clementine orange crate. It was just the perfect size for the trap and it had holes in the bottom that we could use to create a trap for the leprechaun.

We covered the top and sides of the box with green, brown, and tan shamrocks. I thought it would be fun to give the box a camouflage look. After all we were trying to camouflage the trap from the leprechaun.

Then we created a trap using a pulley with an applesauce cup attached to it.  The pulley was made of a piece of yarn wrapped  attached to an old spool. The other end of the string was placed through one of the holes in the back of the crate. The old spool was slipped onto a straw that had a pipe cleaner wrapped around it. The straw with pipe cleaner was placed through holes in the back of the crate. The ends of the pipe cleaner were used to secure the straw in place by spreading them out.

The end of the string  behind the crate was pulled up slowly to raise the cup and then the end of the string was tucked underneath the crate. JDaniel put in some items he thinks are treasures to test it out.

After a few attempts at raising the string, we added pipe cleaner segments to the ends of the spool to keep the string from coming off the spool and tangling on the straw.

Then we painted the box. We should have painted the box before we did the pulley tests, but we did it afterwards. We did remove the pulley system before we painted the inside of the box. The box was painted completely green on the inside. I thought it would be pretty.

The only real problem with the trap is that there won't be someone around to pull the leprechaun up in the middle of the night. Well, there might be. Dad may be up to have his midnight snack. JDaniel drew him an illustration of how the trap works. You will notice the leprechaun approaching the trap at the bottom of the page. I am to write out directions on how the trap work so my husband will know what to do.

The trap won't be tested out until St. Patrick's Day. I have heard that is when leprechauns are most active. We will just have to wait and see. If we do catch one or temporarily trap one, I sure hope he leaves JDaniel a treat.

I promise to post how our trap works out on our Facebook page on Sunday. I hope I will have little man to share with you.

Here are some of the stories we have told about leprechaun. JDaniel told me a few years ago that I ran over one in my car. I shared that adventure in a post called I Did Not Kill a Leprechaun. To this day I stand by my innocence. The thud JDaniel heard under my care was not a leprechaun. I also shared a story about a leprechaun that smudge the rainbow he walked on in a post called Walking on a Watery Way Toward Treasure. JDaniel created a beautiful rainbow for this post.

This post is linked to Mrs. Matlock's Alphabe Thursday.