Kids love making things, exploring and transforming stuff with their hands. I like giving my children crafts with growth potential, so there is another step to take if they want it. Start with a small woven mat, and your child may want to keep weaving until you have a blanket, a wall hanging, and a whole set of mats.

Weaving, moving one thread up and down through another thread, can help a child learn basic mathematical skills, fine motor control, dexterity, and concentration. And, creating a beautiful product from quality materials builds self-confidence and gives your child a sense of accomplishment.

It’s lambing season. We’re celebrating by focusing on the wool that lambs and sheep give us. We often talk about wool as a useful fiber for cloth diapering, but we love wool for many other household uses. Wool feels good in the hands. As children develop their skills, we like knowing that they are doing so using natural fibers. If you would like to go back and try other crafts with your children, we’ve shared ideas for felting wool balls and spool knitting over the past couple of weeks.

Start with a Loom

You can build a simple tapestry loom with a frame and pegs at the top and bottom. You can make it any size and shape your materials allow. That might be a future project, though. For those just starting out, we sell a basic 12-peg wooden loom that both children and adults will enjoy using.

Need

• Loom
• Wool yarn
• String for warp
• Needle or shuttle

How Weaving Works

Basic weaving has warp and weft. You use string up and down between the top and bottom pegs of the loom to create the warp. This provides the basic structure of your woven piece. You can weave so the warp is covered or so that it shows. The main yarn that gives your weaving color and weight is the weft. Weft means woven (weaved > wef-ed > weft). This is the thread or yarn that is woven through the strings of the warp.

The simplest way to start weaving is to use a needle. Using a fine point helps your child navigate up over one string and down under the next while the fine needle is small enough that they can easily see their progress as they weave.

At the end of each row, you can press down the yarn you’ve just woven through the strings (called beating the weft), or you can leave the fabric less dense and let the warp show. With a child, I like to create one piece by the simplest method then add a new technique for the next piece. I recommend starting with a looser woven piece. This is also much quicker to make, and an easy win can be motivation to put in more time for the next piece.

When your child is finished weaving on the basic loom, the piece should hold together when you take it off the pegs. You may need to push the weft around a bit to even out the rows.

How Many Doll Blankets Do You Need?

If your child comes to enjoy weaving, you may end up with a lot of doll blankets, purses, and coasters. As my children started producing more and more little pieces of work, I steered them toward using those small pieces to produce bigger pieces.

Make a Pillow. If your child weaves six pieces on the small wooden loom, each approximately 6.5″ x 10″ (depending on how tight they pull as they are weaving), you can sew those together to create one 20″ x 20″ piece, which is perfect for a throw pillow. If you either sew that piece to the front of an existing pillow or make a new pillow with some sturdy fabric on the back then fill it with a 20″ x 20″ pillow form, you have a beautiful object that you can use around the house. You give your child the experience of creating a complete object. What a great gift that would be for grandma. My family still uses pillows made by my children years ago. I love that constant reminder.

Make a Blanket. If your child loves weaving even after you have plenty of pillows, move on to making blankets. My daughter kept making new projects until she found her level at the size of baby blankets. Just be open to using all of the little pieces of weaving in a bigger project of some kind.

Very Basic Weaving. Did you weave potholders as a child? I did. I learned weaving with cotton loops on a square potholder loom. The difference between the wooden peg loom and the potholder loom is in the weft. For potholders, single loops are the weft for each separate row; for the small tapestry loom, one continuous piece of yarn is your weft row after row. We carry the traditional potholder loom and extra cotton weaving loops because we think your child might enjoy basic weaving as a confidence-building experience.

More Advanced Weaving. If you have kids who like to experiment, and who doesn’t, increase the challenge as they learn weaving.

• Weave with thread. Try doing the same kind of piece on a tiny loom.
• Build a giant loom. See how big you can go. Weave a whole blanket all at once rather than creating a patchwork of smaller pieces.
• Draw with yarn. Learn how to use the weft and the warp to create geometric shapes then organic shapes then images.
• Learn about weaving. This would be a great opportunity to look at weaving in a museum or gallery. Read storybooks about weaving. I love Elsa Beskow’s Pelle’s New Suit, in which a young shepherd uses his lamb’s wool to have a new suit made, and Charles Blood’s The Goat in the Rug, which tells the story of Navajo weaving from a goat’s point of view. Both books tell stories that engage a child in process from animal through to the final product.

The more your child connects what they are learning with the world around them, the better. Weaving holds a world of such potential expression, whether they weave a story in tapestry or just make a potholder.

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Halfway between the first day of winter and the first day of spring is the traditional beginning of lambing season, though new sheep might actually be born anytime from December through May. To celebrate sheep, lambs, and the beautiful wool they give us, we are sharing several weeks of wool crafts you can do with your children.

Felted Wool Balls

Wool Dryer Balls have become a very popular way to add natural scent and quicker drying agitation to machine drying cloth diapers, linens, or any clothing. You can easily make these dryer balls yourself the hard way, the easy way, or the super easy way.

Wool Balls the Hard Way

Actually, the hard way isn’t that hard. If you have seen felted wool figures and wished you could learn to do that, too, wool balls are a perfect way to start your wool felting adventure.

This method is certainly easy enough to do with children, though you may want to start with smaller wool beads.

Need:

• Wool roving
• Detergent
• Hot water
• Needle felting needles
• Needle felt mat
• Bowl
• Towel

Wool roving comes in a big variety of beautiful colors. Some people use a lower quality wool for the center of the ball and save the colors for the outside of the ball where they will show.

Your first step is to wind the wool tight. Keep winding the roving around your ball quite tight, making an effort to keep it smooth and even. If you have made a Waldorf doll or other wool doll, you already know how to do this. When you have a ball of roving about as big as a grapefruit, you are ready to felt your dryer ball.

This is where the felting starts. You place your ball on the felting mat and start poking the ball with your felting needle. This forces the wool fibers through and around one another. You can do this by squeezing and rolling without the felting tools, but the felting won’t be as tight.

Once your ball is smooth and round, you begin felting in water. Dip the ball in a bowl of very hot water with a tiny bit of detergent, then roll the ball around in your hands. The scales on the individual fibers open in the hot water then close on other fibers as you roll the ball and it cools. The individual wool fibers hold on to one another, and you have a felted ball.

I call this the hard way, but it’s really very easy. It’s just that the other ways of making felt balls are even easier.

Felting supplies are available at craft stores.

Wool Balls the Easy Way

If you don’t want to buy felting tools, you can still felt large and small wool balls.

Need:

• 100% wool yarn
• tapestry needle
• pantyhose
• non-wool thread

Single ply wool yarn will work best, but you can use any all-wool yarn.

Start by winding the yarn around two fingers several times, then fold that yarn in half and use it as your core. Now, keep winding and keep it tight.

You don’t need to make this ball quite as big as the roving ball, though it will tighten up some. When the ball is just bigger than you want it to be, cut the yarn and use your tapestry needle to thread through the ball so it doesn’t unwind in the felting process.

At this point, you could do the wet felting above, but this is the easy version, so we’re just going to drop the balls in pantyhose. Put the first ball in the toe, then tie the pantyhose tight with thread. Drop in the next, tie off, and so on until you have a continuous sausage of wool balls.

Now, wash on hot and dry on hot. Just throw the balls in with a load of towels. Once they are dry, cut the threads and free the dryer balls.

Wool Balls the Easiest Way

Even young children can make felt balls, but it helps to keep the project short.

Need:

• Felted Balls Kit

We have a colourful wool ball kit that takes about 10 minutes to make. The short cut is to use a tennis ball as the center, wrapping the wool roving around the tennis ball. Then, wet felt and squeeze to create a colorful toy for child or pet.

This kit would make a great party craft.

Keep Going!

Vary Size. Adapt any of these methods to make smaller balls for wool beads, doll heads, or other small items. Remember to keep them larger than your small children could swallow.

Add Colour. Dye your own wool or experiment with colors you can buy.

Change Shape. Felting can be used to create flat fabrics or very elaborate sculptures

Once you see how easy it is to create your own felted wool toys, you’ll be hooked.

Image © Paulselway | Dreamstime.com

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Puzzles and games are essential for every kid as holiday gifts. Where to find a game that doesn’t encourage competition and bad feelings, though?

Growing up in my family, every person had to receive at least one puzzle for the holidays. As I grew older and more smart alecky, I gave my mother puzzles with thousands of pieces, or glowing pieces, or same on both sides, or some other nearly impossible puzzle. She still worked her way through every one. Now that my mother is gone, I still need to give my mother-in-law and my children puzzles. They drive me crazy, but everyone else loves them. I realize more over time that putting together a puzzle is a meditative activity, and it has always been one of those essential holiday activities in my family.

If you find that your children need that quiet time during a busy holiday season, consider encouraging down time with a puzzle. Also, if they see you doing a more difficult puzzle, they will get more and more curious until they take over. That’s my experience, anyway!

Another of those essentials for my family both growing up and now with my children is board games or card games. My children love playing my old games, and we still add several new games a year to our game closet. Over the holidays, we give small gifts over several days, and one day is always a game for the whole family. Since there are no other gifts to distract us, we have a family game day.

There are a lot of classic games available, but I find that my children become more competitive when they see the opportunity to win. That isn’t really the feel I’m going for with family game day, so we favor the cooperative games. At bynature.ca, we carry a lot of cooperative games and puzzles to fit your family’s interests.

Puzzles for Children

Port Side Pirates Puzzle

Looking for an interlocking puzzle? Set sail with these two puzzles based on the Port Side Pirates sing-along book. The 12-piece puzzle shows the pirate crew discovering a treasure chest ashore the tropical island. The 24-piece puzzle shows the pirate crew sailing the high seas aboard their ship. The two puzzles allow for a range of difficulty included all in one box.
Age: 3+

Wooden Mosaic Puzzle

If you are looking for a puzzle that will last longer than an interlocking puzzle that is used a few times, try our high quality wooden mosaics. Our large puzzle has 192 colorful triangle an trapezoid-shaped pieces. Arrange them in the bamboo tray or go rogue and put the rainbow of colors together any way that suits you. Includes a travel and storage bag.
Age: 3+

Cooperative Family Games

Elves and Ogres

The Royal Elf Family is coming to visit their Mountain Kingdom. They want the Elves (players) to fill their treasure chests with the different gems they mine. Ogres, however, have heard about the visit and plan to grab all the valuables for themselves. Work together to get Royals & Ogres alike to share the goodies. The game requires lots of tricky teamwork, increasing in difficulty with rules for 3 games based on age (ages 5-7, ages 7-12 & ages 12+).
Ages: 5+

Snowstorm

When a winter storm hits the city, the players help out residents by completing their tasks. The weather is constantly changing so players must keep on top of errands by paying attention to weather reports and moving through snow and ice with cars and service trucks. The game is different every time you play.
Ages: 5+

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Are you facing a rainy day with restless kids indoors? Once my children decide that it is summer, they crave activity every day, even if they spend less time outside because of the weather. That’s when I find them bouncing around and looking for something interesting to do.

At bynature.ca, we have a few new toys that help your children find new worlds to explore indoors when they have had enough of the weather outdoors.

Angling Fever Toy Fishing Game

I can hear it. You ask your child, “Do you want to go fishing?” But, it’s raining outside. Create an adventure day inside with this fishing game. There are four poles and twelve fish in four colours, so you can try to match colors by catching the fish and putting them on the stand of the same colour, or just mix up the rainbow. Includes small parts, so this toy is for over 3 years old only.

Wooden Toy Spaceship

For hours of imaginative play, our new wooden spaceship can take your child from blast off to splash down. Includes human (and alien) figures, vehicles, and a bunch of moving parts on the ship itself. 37 pieces total—all wood, so you can feel good about your child spending hours with this toy. This is an adorable and durable toy.

Wishbone Flip Ride-on Rocking Toy

For restless toddlers, you need a tough toy that encourages activity and stays interesting for a long time. With the Wishbone Flip, your active explorer can rock, ride, or push. It takes you, the parent, just a few seconds (and no tools) to flip and twist. You can also adjust the main bolts so the toy grows with your child. This is a beautiful wooden toy made with sustainably managed beech wood. We love this toy both for its sustainability and the flexible fun it provides a toddler.

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Family Basic
Families quickly accumulate excess ‘stuff’ when a baby first appears on the scene. Apart from a lot of love, healthy food, appropriate clothing, and a safe place to sleep, there really isn’t all that much our little ones need (despite the many Must Have lists out there!). Spend your money wisely on products or playthings that have proven to be the most useful necessities, or have extended play value beyond the first few years. We have limited our Family Basics products to the 25 top picks among our staff, customers and experienced parents.

We’re surrounded by stuff and nonsense. When I think of the difference between the stuff I acquired for my first baby and the way I let go of stuff for my second, I see the gap between the sincere intention to be a good parent and enough experience to know that I could do it without props.

There are cool tools out there in parenting land, but everyone doesn’t need the same cool tools. Our needs vary, so our appropriate stuff levels vary. There are a few rules to keep in mind, though.

1. All of us can probably make do with less than we think we can.
2. Multi-function tools that we can grow into will serve us better and longer than single-function tools we can grow out of.
3. Reusable stuff is better than non-reusable stuff.
4. Just because materials are new and revolutionary doesn’t mean they are essential to a sustainable future.

Remember, the stuff that you bring into your family while your children are young is important not just for what it does now but for how it will influence the future. We create our children’s patterns of thinking and acting as we model life for them. If we want our children not to be consumed by marketing, it helps if we aren’t consumed ourselves. If we want our children to value people and relationships over stuff, it helps if we do.

Only a few of our products are so necessary to parenting that we have called them Family Basics. These are the useful necessities with extended value.

Family Basics at bynature.ca

Our family basics fall into several categories: health with natural hand purifier by Clean George, creativity with non-toxic art supplies by Clementine Art Natural, household and personal cleaning with Bummas reusable wipes, and play with colorful playsilks.

Play cloths are the perfect toy, the kid example of multi-functional stuff that encourages a child’s creativity and resourcefulness. I have noticed this week that my children, on the edge of their teen years, are using several play cloths as rivers of water and lava around which they have built elaborate villages with other playcloths creating walls in their rooms. The same play cloths have been essential toys for my children since they were babies.

Our play cloths are 100% natural silk, in a dozen colors dyed with non-toxic dyed, and made responsibly in China.

For the past month, we have been telling you more about our Safe Family Promise at bynature.ca. To make it easy for you to identify products by their key attributes, look for our standards labels.

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We come back to the subject of natural toys often. When the main motivation for choosing toys is to make them plastic-free, I see three main options for materials: wood, natural rubber, and cloth. There are so many great, natural toys available that no child needs plastic toys. It’s just not necessary.

Wood

Before there was hard plastic for toys, there was wood. When I lived in western New York, a friend of mine worked at Fisher Price. I wasn’t that keen to hear about her work because I wasn’t about to use the plastic toys. I remembered their classic wooden toys from my own childhood, though, so I poked and prodded her about that every once in a while asking, “When are you going to start making wooden toys again?” She told me about the wooden prototypes made now to test new toy ideas. “Can I get those?” No, sadly, even those toys that had been classic wooden toys were all made out of plastic and I was not allowed to see, touch, or take home any wooden prototypes. What’s the mental block against a return to the toys that worked so well for so long?

ByNature.ca carries a lot of clicky, clacky, colorful Haba toys. Most of them are rattles and chew toys or both. We also carry the simplest baby toy, a wooden egg shaker, and quite a few little wooden cars and wheeled animals.

Natural Rubber

When my daughter was very young, I realized that her rubber ducky wasn’t rubber. It was made from stinky, cheap old plastic. I was very unpopular when I removed the Plastic Ducky from bathtime for all time. Long after the sting of removing the toxic toy wore off, my daughter found a natural rubber duck (the one shown above) and embraced it as part of her healthy pre-teen lifestyle. She told me that a rubber duck was one toy she had always wanted. As a therapist friend of mine says, it’s never too late to have a happy childhood.

Natural rubber is what early soft plastics were trying to be. Then there was the plastic goo we call Silly Putty. I wrote about the development of rubber-like plastics and the benefits of natural rubber toys last year. Sophie the Giraffe has been handmade of natural rubber for over 50 years, and she’s gaining in popularity. We’ve come full circle back to natural rubber, which never actually went away.

Cloth

Ah, that new doll smell. Your child falls asleep hugging her doll and sniffing that vinyl chloride. No, that’s not a pretty picture. It’s easy to replace plastic dolls with fabric dolls appropriate to any age. ByNature.ca has a collection of organic cotton teething toys and stuffed animals, whose knotted and firm feet and hands are perfect for chewing babies, and we also have small (12″) Waldorf natural baby dolls. The doll my daughter loves and adores for all time is a cotton and wool Waldorf doll of this size.

One of my favorite natural alternatives to common plastic toys is felt play food for playing house, restaurant, store, and so on.

Play cloths are everything in my family. They are wings, capes, rivers, Halloween costumes, decorations, gift wrapping, and more. They aren’t really a replacement for a plastic toy, but I guess they could be seen as an alternative to one-time use or single-purpose off-gassing Halloween costumes or plastic hats or so many other toys that require a little less imagination in play. Having a cape and a collection of silk play cloths around means that you have a huge variety of costumes and toys that take up almost no space. No space means great for travel, by the way.

Art Supplies

There is a place that plasticizers used to sneak into children’s toys, before certain phthalates were banned in children’s products in the U.S., where parents didn’t necessarily think to look for them: art supplies. Kids eat glue and paint, they suck on crayons while they dream of their masterpieces. It’s important to have non-toxic children’s art supplies. ByNature.ca stocks a beautiful collection of Clementine art supplies.

I’ve written a lot about toys made with natural materials as alternatives to plastic toys. It might help to completely throw out ideas about toys and start over with games and natural toys that nurture imagination rather than just trying to find a substitute for a plastic toy.

This week we’ve also suggested plastic-free feeding and plastic-free sleeping products for children. These are Eco Baby Steps, but this is still a STUFF-oriented approach. At the end of June, I will write about how and why we need to make much bigger changes to leave plastics and their toxic chemicals of concern behind us.

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It’s been interesting to follow the story of Pampers Dry Max in the news and on blogs in the past couple of weeks—too many interesting aspects to name them all—but what has slapped me in the face is how little I know about how mainstream parents think. I have been shocked to see parents say things like “this giant company wouldn’t make a product that is anything but safe for my child because it would be bad for business.” So many parents said similar things that I realized this is actually a common assumption.

A massive company whose primary interest is maximizing profit is likely to make products JUST SAFE ENOUGH to find balance between safety (or litigation costs) and the production and materials that give the best profit margins. That’s good business, right? So I’m told.

It turns out that I’m one of the skeptical ones who doesn’t assume that corporations have my children’s health and safety as a priority. This seems to put me outside the mainstream.

Shocking!

So, even carrying the weight of my new-found discovery that I am too skeptical to be mainstream, I am going to suggest that there are whole areas of the children’s product market where soft plastics and chemicals of concern are not ubiquitous. I must have the risk gene because I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that it is possible for parents to raise their babies plastic-free. No, it’s not really a flimsy limb. People all around me are raising plastic-free babies.

How, I wonder, does a plastic-free, reusable, natural material childhood seem so far outside the boundaries of possibility for so many parents? I’m a bit stumped how to create any change in that. I don’t think the argument of hormone disruption reaches everyone. Maybe 60 Minutes will begin to change that.

Then what? Will parents rush to buy wooden rattles and cloth books?

Ubiquitous

I suspect that the argument will be made not that all products have soft plastics as ingredients but that all PEOPLE have soft plastics as ingredients.

The shift in perception that is needed to result in less exposure to the offending ingredients of soft plastics is so massive that it is almost overwhelming along with all of the other choices we need to make in a hyper-industrial world. When I hear parents say, “I grew up fine and my kids will be fine, too” as an excuse not to limit exposures, I wonder what it will take to convince them that we aren’t living in the same chemical world. When even typical—not extreme but typical—levels of phthalates in the body of a pregnant woman can disrupt especially the male reproductive system and this doesn’t result in screaming, arm-waving alarm on the part of mothers, I don’t really know what will reach them.

The good news is, you can reach the people around you with the message of safe, natural toys. You can talk to the parents you meet about chemical exposures.

Frankly, you can talk to parents about how adorable you find a natural rubber giraffe or a wooden fish rattle, and that is likely to reach some for whom the toxic exposure argument will mean little.

Whatever it takes to reduce the chemical body burden on our pre-polluted babies.

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Those gorgeous handmade toys your baby plays with are supported by small business people who make toys because they love children and they love the craft.

The Business of Handmade

Yesterday, members of the Handmade Toy Alliance board of directors testified at the U.S. Commerce Sub-committee hearing regarding the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA). The board has been working with the Sub-committee for months. With requests for specific changes, the Handmade Toy Alliance officially endorsed draft legislation that would bring about changes for small-batch manufacturers, Consumer Product Safety Enhancement Act (CPSEA).

Children’s product manufacturers in the U.S. and Canadian exporters to the U.S. have been wondering for the past 18 months how to comply with the strict testing and labelling requirements of the new law. Understanding the law has been a difficult task for all. For the smallest manufacturers, meeting testing requirements has seemed almost impossible. The Handmade Toy Alliance formed when small business owners came together determined to understand and change the law.

I’ve watched their growth over that time, and these crafters, store owners, and other small business owners have come to understand the system of legislation and regulation—and media. It has been exciting to see them learn how to communicate with rulemakers when the system can seem so overwhelming.

At the heart of this increasingly sophisticated organization are people who do what they do because they care about handmade toys. It’s so simple. They love sock monkeys and felt blocks and play dough. Without their work to push back against this law, to help lawmakers understand how they work every day to preserve toy safety, we might have seen fewer handmade toys available for our children.

Supporting Handmade

For the past month, I’ve spent every Friday writing about the book The Creative Family: How to Encourage Imagination and Nurture Family Connections by Amanda Blake Soule.

The focus of the book is on young children, but I have found plenty to hold the interest of my pre-teen children as well. The book is part of the natural family library of Baby ByNature.ca.

For my last dip into the book, I like a section in the “Handmade Holidays” chapter of the Connecting section of the book called “Supporting Handmade.” As my son’s 10th birthday comes up in the next week, I want to emphasize that any time can be a holiday season if your definition of holiday is broad enough.

“The holiday season can be a great time to show support for crafters and artists for the meaningful work they do. . . . Affordable arts and crafts surround us; we just need to look in the right places to find them.”

Her ideas for finding handmade are:

• Local craft fairs
• Art shows sponsored by local colleges
• Online through sites like Etsy

And, I might add, the members of the Handmade Toy Alliance also sell beautiful children’s toys, and they care deeply about the safety of your children.

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I love that he has such a clear desire to carry his stuff and that his stuff involves so much that is just incomprehensible to others as toys.

But, these are his toys. A rock or a piece of string is as much a toy for him as a ball or a pencil. He gathers toys from the recycling, from the garden, from the garbage, and from interesting mysterious bits that accumulate in the bottom of toy boxes. Anything works as a toy if it intrigues him.

As I was reading through The Creative Family: How to Encourage Imagination and Nurture Family Connections, from the Baby by Nature store, I love the emphasis on natural materials. Author Amanda Blake Soule definitely endorses the anything goes approach to toys.

Among her suggestions are Toys from Natural Materials

• from trees – found sticks and pieces of wood as wooden blocks
• from scraps – a basket of fabric scraps of any size or color (I keep special threads for my children as well. Glowing thread was a big hit this week and has already been incorporated into a special birthday gift from one child to the other.)
• from fibers – yarn and string (though be sure to supervise young children)
• from outdoor collections - rocks, pinecones, and shells

She also suggests Natural Art Supplies

• from the pantry - “beyond the pasta necklace” to seeds and grains of a variety of colors and textures
• from nature – rock, leaves, nuts, bark
• from the garbage – calendars for collage, newspapers for papier-mache, old electronics (like my son loves so much!)
• from thrift shop – dishes, fabrics, or anything that catches their imagination

Recipe for Natural Glue

Combine a 3:1 ratio of flour and sugar in a saucepan. Slowly add cold water until a paste forms. Stir over heat until the mixture thickens. Add 1 teaspoon of white vinegar. This glue will keep in the refrigerator for a few weeks. Allow the glue to warm to room temperature before using it. ~“Alternative Art Materials,” page 39

Image © Melissa Dockstader | Dreamstime.com

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If you are really looking for a bargain this Friday, I have a suggestion.

Buy Handmade

When you are considering holiday gifts for your child, consider buying natural toys from small toymakers.

With handmade natural toys you get

• wild variety and beauty
• high quality with extreme attention to detail
• naturally safe materials like untreated wood and organic cotton & wool
• likelihood that you will know or can find out the provenance of the toy
• support for small manufacturers
• confidence that your toy is made by people who are happy in their work as toymakers

Handmade Toy Alliance

A group of toymakers, retailers, importers, and other small businesses came together a year ago as the Handmade Toy Alliance. Many of these toymakers are making cloth dolls and wooden cars and puzzles and sock monkeys and building blocks by hand because they want to create safe and natural toys for children.

Now, under a new U.S. child safety law (Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of CPSIA), many of these safe, natural toys are threatened because small businesses have no way to comply with laws written in part by and certainly favoring massive international toy companies. It is likely that there will be changes made to the law that will allow these small toymakers to prove the safety of their products without the cost and testing burden written into the law right now.

These changes are not guaranteed, though. If no changes are made to the law or to the interpretation in regulations, most of these natural toys will be things of the past.

This year, while it is still legal in the United States, consider buying an endangered handmade toy for your child. Skip the crowds and Black Friday and choose a naturally safe toy.

The Handmade Movement

Handmade isn’t just for toys. The movement to buy handmade builds on a deep philosophy of DIY. Last year tens of thousands of people pledged to buy handmade. If you are ready to move beyond just toys, check out the resources from Buy Handmade on the broader movement, on conscious consumption, and on the challenge against mass production and selling.

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