Natural Wooden Toys: 75 Easy-to-Make and Kid-Safe Designs to Inspire Imaginations and Creative Play

Erin Freuchtel Dearing

Fox Chapel Publishing Company, Incorporated, 2011 - Crafts & Hobbies - 183 pages

Think making safe, colorful, and irresistible imagination-building wooden toys is impossible? Think again! Erin Freutchel-Dearing, a stay-at-home mom who taught herself how to make toys without any prior woodworking experience, show with step-by-step instructions how to make cute and creative wooden toys for children using just a scroll saw, a palm sander, and a drill. Explore more than 75 charming designs in Fairytale, Forest, Farm, Ocean, and City themes:

*Ocean wave stacker

*Fairytale princess

*4-piece bunny family

*15 parent and baby animal pairs, including seahorses, cows, and squirrels

*Vehicles, including a tractor, boat, and airplane

Instructions on creating natural and non-toxic colorful finishes are included. Sidebars throughout the book explain how to incorporate open-ended Waldorf-style elements into your child's play. These captivating wooden toys will encourage a child's creativity by helping them set a scene with a backdrop, characters, and accessories—the rest is up to them!

What people are saying

Review: Natural Wooden Toys: 75 Easy-to-Make and Kid-Safe Designs to Inspire Imaginations & Creative Play

User Review  - Katie - Goodreads

this is a great book! easy to understand and pretty pictures. i especially like the section on natural dyes. as soon as i get a scroll saw, i will definitely be making some of these toys.

Review: Natural Wooden Toys: 75 Easy-to-Make and Kid-Safe Designs to Inspire Imaginations & Creative Play

User Review  - Brooke Berry - Goodreads

I found this book very inspiring. Not only did it have a lot of great ideas on what to make, she gave great tips on how to stain your projects and paint while still keeping them safe for your children to chew on if they needed to! Great book, hard to read on an e-reader.

About the author

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Erin Freutchel-Dearing is a stay-at-home mom with two young children. Concerns about the safety of her children's toys, as well as the low level of play and imagination they were promoting, led her to purchase a scroll saw on Craigslist and learn to make wooden toys from scratch. Her previous experience with a sewing machine made the transition to the scroll saw effortless. She began selling her creative, colorful, and child-safe toys on Etsy.com. She was chosen from over 2000 applicants to become a part of Etsy's 25-member Second Community Council and represents the areas of toys and woodworking. As Erin put it, "I am evidence that your typical mom with very little familiarity with power tools can learn to make simple, safe, creative, open-ended wooden toys for their children."

Bibliographic information

• Title: Natural Wooden Toys: 75 Easy-to-Make and Kid-Safe Designs to Inspire Imaginations and Creative Play
• Author: Erin Freuchtel Dearing
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: Fox Chapel Publishing Company, Incorporated, 2011
• ISBN: 156523524X, 9781565235243
• Length: 183 pages
• Subjects: Crafts & Hobbies / Toymaking; Crafts & Hobbies / Wood Toys; Crafts & Hobbies / Woodwork