I’ll admit I totally bought this toy for myself.  I fell for this wooden robot the first time I saw him and saved up my pennies (this is no 2 dollar plastic pig) so I could take him home.  This gentle giant is designed by David Weeks, who has made many super fantastic things like the beautiful and clever flashlight/candlestick combo the castlight.  Well designed toys are much easier to find these days, but they are sometimes more design than toy, know what I mean? But this simple robot is just right. Be warned, once he moves out of cube form you will have to work pretty hard to get him to go back to that convenient shape again unless you are some sort of rubiks master.

We are at a toy crossroads these days, I think. My girl is five and my boy is four (the baby is happy playing with a spoon). They still play with little people ,we call them guys, but they are in pretty rough shape–most have a limb or an ear chewed off by the dog.  Is there a toy like little people for the next age up–playmobile maybe? Blocks and big legos are still going strong. We are slowly venturing into little legos as the baby stops putting everything in his mouth. Do you guys have any recommendations for good building toys? We got Citiblocs for christmas and they are super awesome! I would have never picked them up–they just look like sticks, expensive sticks–but they teach you how to build in a different way than regular blocks do. Anyway, long winded way to say, “hey, do you know of any good quality toys that my kids will play with for years to come, rather than the next three minutes?”

I’m sure you know what a tangram is but didn’t know it was called a tangram (when I looked it up, I think I might have typed, “that clever triangle-y puzzle thing”). If you’ve never even seen one, well then: it’s sort of a puzzle and sort of a game that involves five triangles, one square, and one parallelogram.  The objective is to figure out how to make a given shape, which is shown only in silhouette, using the pieces and not overlapping any.  My kids and I had a blast just playing around with the shapes and seeing what we could make. I thought you might like to make some too:

Materials:

• balsa wood (or sturdy cardboard, foam core, or actual wood wood, but you will need different tools for cutting the wood)
• a sharp pencil
• ruler
• exact-o knife
• fine grit sandpaper
• paint brush and paint (optional)

Directions:

1. Use an exact-o knife to cut the balsa wood into a 4 inch square.  The piece of balsa wood I got at Michael’s Crafts was 4 inches wide already, so I only needed to cut it once to make a square.

2. Next you need to draw a 1 inch grid on the square very, very lightly. Draw a line one inch from the edge, then another one inch from that, one more and then turn the square 90 degrees and do it again. If you press down on the balsa wood at all it will make an indentation that won’t come out, so keep the pencil marks very, very faint.

3. Now we are going to draw 5 lines. I think it would be more confusing for me to explain where all the lines are drawn, so you can just follow the series of lines I drew above. Use the grid as a guide: draw through the corners, or on the lines, whichever is indicated by the picture. The first picture is the grid and the next five show the sequence of lines to draw.
4. Lightly erase the grid.
5. Take your exact-o knife and ruler and cut on the lines. Cut the shapes out in generally the same order you drew the lines. If you have a sharp blade it should take 3 or 4 passes along the line to cut through the balsa wood. It helps if you start a little above where you are cutting, instead of starting right on the line. Go slow and try to keep the blade perpendicular to the wood.

6. Lightly sand the pieces.

7. Paint (if you like). It’s nice to have both sides painted–especially the parallelogram–because it makes it easier to make more pictures with your tangrams, but I think they are equally beautiful not painted at all.  It’s up to you.

You can even make a little cute box for your new tangram set to go in. The box I got was a little too small for the pieces to fit just right–oh well.  Now go play: you can make animals, letters, quilts,  cookies even and this book looks lovely too. Watch out though, you might get carried away:

click here to see all the faux bois builders.People love making forest creatures, so why not make the forest too. I tried my hand at this plush craze. But when it’s late and you should be in bed and not attempting to start something new, you don’t realize that if you make softie that looks like a cake that looks like a log it just ends up looking like a piece of wood. duh. I thought it was a genius idea to make a little plush buche de noel for the ornament swap, but it just looks like a sad little log. Oh well, I have a couple more ideas. My first ornament came in the mail today, so I better get a move on.