A wooden baby gym is one of those toys that looks like a piece of design furniture and earns its place from week one. My daughter spent the first six months of her life under hers, batting at the dangling rings and grasping for the wooden teether. It folds flat when she napped, which mattered […]
Author Archives: Chris Bell
My first "workshop" was a corner of a one-bedroom apartment with a Black & Decker Workmate, three cordless tools, and a vacuum cleaner pulled in from the lounge for dust collection. I built nine toys there before we moved to a house with a garage. The lesson I took with me: a small space limits […]
When my daughter was three, I gave her a small hammer, a block of pine, and a jar of fat-headed nails. Two hours later she'd driven twelve nails (eight of them sideways), bashed her thumb once, and announced she was a builder. I've never been prouder of a Sunday afternoon. That session — and the […]
If you're raising a kid you'd like to one day work with wood, build them their own workbench. Not a toy bench with plastic tools — a real, kid-scaled workbench they can hammer on, drill at, screw into, and grow into. My daughter got hers at three. By four, she was driving real screws into […]
A simple marble run is the build that turns a casual kid into a budding engineer. Mine certainly did. The first time I set up a five-piece run on the kitchen floor, my daughter watched the marble roll, asked why it slowed down at the turn, and tried to rebuild the run to make the […]
An activity board (or "busy board") is the high-leverage toddler toy nobody talks about enough. It's a single flat board covered with locks, latches, switches, beads, gears, and other things a one-to-three year old loves to fiddle with. Done right, an activity board absorbs a toddler's attention for genuinely long stretches — the only toy […]
I've been making wooden toys for nearly five years now, and most of the bad builds I've produced were the result of the same small set of mistakes I made over and over. The good news is they're all avoidable once someone tells you. This is the list I wish I'd had when I built […]
When my daughter was two, she walked into my workshop while I was cutting a piece of beech on the mitre saw. I'd left the door open for the dog. I caught her at the threshold, but the moment cost me ten years off my life. That afternoon I rebuilt how the workshop interacts with […]
A rocking horse is the build that earns you bragging rights. It's also the one that, done right, becomes a family heirloom — passed from child to child, with the same hand-shaped silhouette getting climbed onto by your kid and your kid's kid. Commercial wooden rocking horses from Charm Company or Manhattan Toy run $150-$300; […]
A wooden balance board is one of those toys that justifies its shelf space ten times over. It's a bridge, a slide, a rocking boat, a tunnel, a stepping stool, a spaceship — whatever the child decides today. The commercial versions (Wobbel, Kinderfeets) run $150-$200, which is fair given the build quality, but you can […]