Kathleen Haddon

String games, of which "cat's cradle" is one, are, or were, widely played across the world, from the Eskimo north to the Pacific Islands and New Guinea as well as among the Navajo and Apache. Ms Haddon's book first published in 1934 shows how to make nearly thirty of the more common figures. As she says in the Preface, scientific terminology and the more complicated figures have been avoided, with the result that some of them need no more than average dexterity to accomplish.