Opening Remarks

After lots of thought about writing a book about The Toycrafter, I have pretty much decided that such an undertaking would be far too big a challenge.  Just the thought of trying to get all the stories, thoughts, triumphs, stumbles, etc. into an organized book format, has seemed way too daunting!  I'm almost 70 - coming up soon - and have way to many projects that I want to tackle.  Any one of about 6 or 8 projects come to mind, and any one of them could use up a year or two or three of my time, cutting short my time for bike riding, designing new things, playing with my three grandchildren, etc!  Thus, my decision to create a blog about The Toycrafter.  My plan is to sort of randomly tell stories about my years as The Toycrafter, and also including info about the years after I sold The Toycrafter.  I'm hoping to include some stories and observations from some of my former employees/friends who shared in various parts of the about 35 years of toycrafting.  We went from just me alone in a friend's basement with a small hobby jigsaw - which I still have -, to about 30 of us making close to a million toys a year, taking up the entire 4th floor of the Fedder Industrial Park.  Probably about 20,000 square feet including some storage on other floors in the building!

I'm going to take pictures, or use old pictures, or scan old sales sheets, etc., and then share my recollections about The Toycrafter.  I  will not even try to adhere to any time sequence.  For example, yesterday, an old friend gave me some un-trimmed blanks of some packaging inserts that went with one of our less memorable failures - a product called "Spin-n-Win".  Due to my definite inclination to not throw out things, I actually have some of the tops from the one and only batch we made, and a whole chapter comes to mind!  Yesterday I also found on E-bay, one of my old Limberjacks for sale.  A definite several blog entries about Limberjacks come to mind.  (I may actually buy that limberjack on E-bay, because I'm not sure I have one of that style - especially because this one has a "carved" head, and I only remember doing a shaped head on a very few of that design!) Picture below, but I will add more about limberjacks later. (later note - I did not "win" the auction for this limberjack.)

Anyway, I'm looking forward to blogging about The Toycrafter, and I especially invite any former employees, customers, friends, etc. to offer comments about their recollections of The Toycrafter, and the many toys we made over the years - some very successful, and many total duds - I remember one in particular that we only got one order for, and that one got cancelled before we shipped!  I know I will enjoy this, and I hope you will too!