Best Handmade Toys of 2014

These are a few things that happened to me for the first time in 2014: I was called “mama” by my son, tried fried ice-cream, grew ground cherries in my garden, learnt to use an angle grinder, broke my laptop’s screen by simply pushing my thumb into it, and started my blog.

To tell the truth, I had a blog before – a little personal blog where I could post an idea in a single sentence that came to me as I was watching the falling stars in August, or where I could write a long, meticulously detailed, and boring analysis of a failed relationship of my youth. I wrote my thoughts down without censoring them. My friends read it, and it was a great way to keep in touch with them, especially after I had moved abroad. Oh, it also was in Russian.

When I started this blog last March, I expected it to be similar, only in English. I thought it would be a fun way to keep in touch with our Canadian relatives and friends. However, it worked out differently. I got involved in a community of kid bloggers, and inspired by their example, turned my blog into an outlet for our family’s creative projects. The idea that my writings and pictures can also be inspiring to people helped me work on more and more projects, which resulted in the most creative and productive year that I have ever had. Thank you for reading my blog! It would not have been possible without you.

I hope that the next year will bring even more interesting projects as we follow along with our plans. Some of them include writing a book, building an indoor playground, making and decorating a big dollhouse, and experimenting more with wood and clay. Another exciting bit of news is that my husband plans to join me in writing the occasional post for this blog. He has always been here, helping me with projects, editing my posts, giving many suggestions on technical details, and I cannot wait to see him write about his own creative projects. He has just finished a train whistle, so you can expect to see a tutorial on making one soon.

With the new year looking bright and fun, I would also like to turn back to the previous year and remember the most popular posts you could find on the pages of this blog. This selection is based on the statistics of page views, so it is a choice made by you, as my readers. To be fair, I excluded round-ups and seasonal posts, and was left with a fun selection of handmade toys we created over the last year.

As a part of the collaborative series Best 0f 2014 Posts, I was asked to choose my favourite post from the previous year. Incidentally, it was not my most popular post, though it was among top ten. Making a Fairy Tree House is my favourite. I wrote it in the first month since creating my blog, and it was my very first tutorial for making a toy. I liked doing it so much that, as the year progressed, I focused most of my efforts on building handmade toys and writing about them. Handmade toys became my passion: I like the opportunity of creating exactly what my son will like and saving some money along the way.

Another of my favourites is miniature doll house, as well. Doll House in a Box was my favourite project of the last year. Full of little details, like a wooden cuckoo clock and a quilted blanket, this house fit in a 8 1/2 x 11 box, and had three rooms with a fireplace. I had tremendous fun making it! While our house was inspired by my son’s favourite book, Room on the Broom, the idea of building a house in a box has a lot of potential for other settings.

Waldorf-Inspired Nature Blocks is my most popular post of 2014. From creating forest-inspired scenes for animals to building rustic doll house furniture, these blocks can find a variety of uses in the playroom. Yet they are free and very simple to make!