About West End Village Toys

It all started when…

As a kid, I spent many summers traveling with my mom from craft fair to craft fair in small towns across southern and central Vermont. She was a weaver and I helped her pack and unpack boxes of colorful wool rugs, geometrically pattered blankets, and soft, luxurious scarves, always wandering through the stalls and visiting with the other craft fair kids and admiring the hoards of beautiful creations offered by the other artists and crafters. Though I never imagined myself as one of them, I was primed for a life of creative pursuits, lured by the possibilities of what could be made anew from combining different everyday materials. I loved crafting little toys and inventing silly games with whatever scrapes of fabric my mom passed on, or objects from nature I collected in our backyard.

As a teacher, resources are always scarce, there’s never enough funding to go around, and right in my very first classroom, I tapped into my roots and started making my own toys and other tools to support the interests of my preschool students. I was energized by the opportunity to get creative and figure out how to meet my supply needs on the cheap. My first toys were mostly made from paint samples I’d collected at the hardware store, a few sharpies, and a collection of clothes pins I found in my school’s supply closet. I designed a puzzle game to support my early readers and it was like something inside me was unlocked. Suddenly I was flooded by memories of craft projects I’d done as a kid, making gnome dolls from corks and felt scraps, picking out fabric with my mom for a new dress for my dolly, and weaving millions of potholders for my grandmother at the holidays.

The allure of designing toys was pulling me out of the classroom and into a new roll as a curriculum design specialist. I started making toys, drafting classroom layouts, and designing activities to support all the classrooms at my school. From there I moved to a few different states, tried out blogging and REALLY into Pinterest, all the while continuing to make toys for the various children in my care and my own West End Village School classroom, which opened in 2018. Over the years my designs became a bit more involved, more elaborate, and I honed my design and craft skills. But it wasn’t until I experienced the gift of time, an unexpected and highly cherished silver lining of the Coronavirus Pandemic that closed our school for six months, that I began to think seriously about making toys on any kind of scale. Until I had the time to truly sort out the logistics, I never saw toymaking as anything more than something I did to feed my soul and solve the constant classroom dilemma of not being able to find the exact toy or tool I want to help support my young friends in their learning adventures.

So, with the support of friends and family, I decided that it was finally time to make this long-growing dream a reality and share my favorite pieces publicly, the ones I’ve come to love making using in my own classrooms and with my own kiddo at home. With the addition of digital drawing and design added to my DIY skill repertoire, at last a vision of how I might offer my creations at a saleable scale finally emerged and the rest is still unfolding day by day. It’s been a wild journey of experimenting with different techniques and designs and learning on the go, but it’s been so much fun, and hand made, custom designed toys have become a staple of our West End Village Classroom. Things have come together in such a beautiful and unexpected way, and I am thrilled to get my toys and tools in the hands of children far beyond the reach of my small West End classroom. I hope you enjoy playing with them as much as I enjoy making them!