Selfsufficientish.com

Also try elemental toys www.elementaltoys.co.uk which all come from ethical producers. They have dolls, puzzles and early learning toys, toys we had like skipping ropes and same wonderful world music cds for children.

for a birthday coming up I intend to make a wild things handbag and fill it with horses... but the horses could be a problem.....

We've sworn off toys from China, too. What we ended up doing for the last year was buying things like legos and local made toys. If you check around you might find wood crafters and such. You can also look for items that were made 'way back when' like toy cars from the 50s etc which were usually made Not in China.

Hope that helps.

mrsflibble wrote:for a birthday coming up I intend to make a wild things handbag and fill it with horses... but the horses could be a problem.....

Conkers, acorns and match sticks - that's how we used to make them!

lol! I ended up getting clothes for her instead. the jumper was well and truly ish though. it was a fairly boring next jumper from a charity shop for which I made a patchwork heart (making sure materials matched both in colour but also in make-up so it wont go out of shape when washed; also reinforced with a backing piece for the same reason)... Hannah Banana loved it.

Thanks for the suggestions and links! I'll be bookmarking those and using them as inspiration when shopping around here for my new babe. I instituted a plastic- and battery-free rule for Abigail's gifts, which was mostly respected by gift givers so far. She received many fabulous organic cotton toys, blankets and clothes as well as homemade items and clothes from consignment shops.
I suspect it will get harder to enforce this as the years go by... so it will be handy to have a good reference list of acceptable companies and suggestions. Inevitably a lot of my family will say "how about I just give you money" rather than put the effort into finding non-China gifts.