A woodworker named Giuseppe, whom the villagers named Blue Nose for his drinking habit, lived once upon a time in an Italian village. One day, when he wanted to carve a table leg out of a log that he took, he discovered that the log could talk. That surprised and scared him so he gave the log away to Papa Carlo, a petty street performer who was his friend. Papa Carlo carved a puppet out of the log, and the log withstood it, but the puppet quickly sprang to life with incredulous Papa Carlo not willing to take notice of that. Instead he saw that the nose of his puppet was too long and attempted at shortening it, but the boy who used to be a puppet did not approve of that…
There’s an air of familiarity about this story, but several details don’t match. This is the Russian Aleksey Tolstoy’s story about Buratino and his wooden friends. After having read the story of Pinocchio in childhood, he lost the much cherished book. He decided at that time that he would rewrite it, which occurred but many years later, when he had his own children to tell stories to. The book added the author’s own childhood fantasies and his information on puppets to retelling Collodi’s well known story.
Life was not gifted only to literary puppets and to minutely carved puppets which have realistic traits and sculptural value. Puppets surprisingly resembling crude firework, with barely suggested human shapes also presented poor people from Turkish to Italian medieval markets with puppet theatre, a powerful form of folk art with strong aspects of criticism often displayed. For centuries, such firewood has replaced comedy characters. If we look at the wooden playthings at which our children play, some often vaguely shaped but very distinctively contoured to their eyes, it is enough to understand how this magic works and every parent can be a part of that.
The warmness of wood still makes a deep impression on our emotional world, although we live now in a world made from concrete, metal and glass. The parents should not abandon the tradition of playthings carved from such a nature-friendly material, for this reason. After being the only the only available classroom aids some time ago, wooden alphabets and jigsaw puzzles are trendy once again. They are cut in various curved shapes and richly colored with modern inexpensive technologies. If you offer young children with wooden animals, more or less clearly shaped or realistic, you would greatly stimulate their imagination. Small carved wood objects are never a problem of money and unexpected joy can be brought even with small stationery items, like pencil heads shaped like heads of dolls. And the jumping jacks and trapezes would make the supreme gifts to a young child when it comes to pocket money toys made from wood.
You can make children equally happy all year round with such gifts, for they require no particular moment of the year to be offered. If you also wish to please their parents, add a small bathroom kit which includes a wooden brush and is contained in a small wooden bucket, or a small bamboo flat spiral encased in a wooden frame, which pops up in shape of a basket, ready to be used as a mini toy container, a flower pot, a fruit storage basket, or a discreet reminder of the times when we were children.
The exhibition of nature-friendly wooden objects from lovely pocket money toys to lavatory requisites enhances the different and original way in which Stonedale select their gifts and merchandise.
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