Incredible: Italian photographer Gabriele Galimberti’s project Toy Stories compiles photos of children from around the world with their prized possesions—their toys.

Rex is just the best.

loogguitars:

Pics from Toy Fair. We went, we showed, we made friends, we won an award and we had fun!

Check out all of our Toy Fair 2013 picks!

Would you do this?

Sweden’s gender-neutral toy catalog (read: girls with Nerf guns and boys with dollhouses)

Move over, Barbie. Girls are going for engineering now. 

thedailywhat:

Nothing Will Ever Be As Cool As This LEGO Batcave of the Day: Words fail to express. 

Detail shots here.

[geekologie]

THIS IS SO COOL! Gotta love Legos. 

Whether experiencing it firsthand or with your child, we all know the heartbreak of losing a cherished stuffed animal. When Liam lost Ah-ah on a camping trip three years ago, he and his family were devastated. But good old mom didn’t give up hope. Click through to hear more about one monkey’s cross country journey back into the arms of his loving best friend.

theweekmagazine:

For those who have everything: Personalized action figures.Just send in two photos of your head — one taken in profile, one straight on. When your package arrives, pop out the head of the original action figure, sub in your own, and Super You is ready for action. 

More great items for those who have everything

For your mantlepiece: personalized action figures of the whole family!

brickstix:

Our thoughts exactly.

melancholywise:

A new Swedish toy catalogue has reversed the traditional gender roles by showing Spiderman pushing a pram, and a young girl riding a toy racecar.

Kaj Wiberg is the CEO of the company behind the catalogue, “Leklust”, and claims that it is time to move forward from old-fashioned gender restrictions.

“Gender roles are an outdated thing,” he told Metro newspaper.

I thought you guys might like this.

Rest of the story can be found here.

Remember Riley, the little marketing whiz, who went on a very valid rant about how lame gender roles are in marketing tactics? She’ll be so proud when she sees this!

(via queerencia-deactivated20130103)

Eco-friendly toys; now in Technicolor!

theatlantic:

When Americans Made Toys By Hand: Inside a 1915 Teddy Bear Factory

Online, as part of our daily labor here on The Atlantic, I often find myself at the Library of Congress searching through hundreds of thousands of photographs of all kinds of things. At a time when algorithms are supposed to be reducing serendipity to the opposite of a chance encounter, I find the blunt search tools at the LOC constantly spit out wonderfully unexpected things.

For Alexander Furnas’ story yesterday about power, privacy, and data tracking, I wanted to find a photograph of a bunch of dolls, so I searched for “doll shop.” Scrolling down the list, I didn’t find what I wanted, but one title for a group of photos caught my eye: “Old men making toys in a shop maintained for their benefit, apparently by society women.” The record told me George Grantham Bain made these pictures in 1915. The extended description read, “Photographs show men cutting animals and dolls from wood. Women purchasing Christmas gifts. Also, teddy bear factory.” There is no more information attached to the record, but who really needs more than TEDDY BEAR FACTORY, really.

See more. [Images: Library of Congress]

Put an educational twist on playtime with these fun science and astronomy-themed toys!

Also, get ideas for science fair projects on our Innovators of Tomorrow page.