Wood Toy News June 8, 2011
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The Little Wooden Toy Shop is a home-based business selling all natural handmade wood toys. The Little Wooden Toy Shop is a home-based business which was started to offer wholesome and simple alternatives in promoting healthy, educational play among our children and within our families. All of the products we sell are made from 100% natural materials, including wood, cotton, wool and silk. A great percentage of the wood used to make many of these toys is harvested directly from the areas where the toys are made. Where possible, fabrics are organic and 100% washable. All finishes and dyes are 100% non-toxic and safe for our children and our animals. A concerted effort has been made to purchase all of our toys and playthings from small family-run businesses and environmentally conscious farmers and homesteaders throughout the United States and Canada. All of these products have been lovingly handmade by talented crafts people and tradesmen schooled in the art of old-fashioned toy making. Dressed in blue work pants and a plaid, flannel shirt, 67-year-old For years, Jim Turbyville made Bill Clark doesn’t look elfin, yet wooden furniture and then from the he has tendencies that suggest scraps he made a few wooden toys. he could fit in with a group of toymaking little people. Lisa Allmendinger, Heritage Newspapers: His first toy was a wooden duck that he continues to sell to this day. “Every time I’d come to the market to sell furniture, I’d sell toys,” he says. Now, the toys dominate his sales at the Sunday Artisan Market in Ann Arbor. Turbyville sets up his booth to be inviting to children who might want to stop and play with one of the 50 different types he sells. Many of them are moving pull toys. “I want children to come in and play with the toys, walk around dragging them,” he says. He believes that if people see children playing with the toys, perhaps they’ll want to buy one. The toys are made from a variety of woods, including cherry, birch and oak. There are buses, cars, animals, trains, airplanes, farm equipment and race cars, to name just a few. The toys include four types of planes and a duck with an egg on its back that moves when the toy is pulled around. In addition to the kids playing with the sturdy toys, the men come into the booth to look at the planes and say they are buying it for their kid, but Turbeyville knows it’s really for them he muses with a broad smile. He says he has two tubs full of toy patterns and makes everything from a Model T to a road grader. The toys range in price from $5 to $50.
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Clark is not Santa Claus. He does, however, take delight in giving away toys now and again. And he does this with a great, big smile on his face. “People that do stuff for me, I give them away,” says Clark of his handmade toys. But he also sells them to people who approach him, and most recently he began selling them through the Museum of the Albemarle Shop, where artisan and shop co-owner Lisa Winslow says his handmade cars, trucks, tractors and trains are a big hit.