With the Easter season upon us, it’s a great excuse to buy your favorite little ones a cute cuddly stuffed toy that they will have for years to come.
Baby Buddy. Photo by Best Years.
If you’re looking for something really special that’s organic cotton and handmade, I just came upon Best Years, which is a toy maker that specializes in handmade organic knitted and crochet toys with the requirement that employees work under fair trade practices.
Best Years – which just showcased at the American International Toy Fair – launching over a dozen new toys this month, featuring new baby buddy toys, scrappy cats and dogs, and more exotic animal toys, including a seahorse, octopus, starfish, and humpback whale. These toys all come from the Under the Nile Organic collection.
Best Years also has two adorable Pebble Fair Trade Cotton Crochet Doll Bunnies – a girl and boy version – that are perfect for Easter. They’re handmade dolls with embroidered faces. The girl version is white with green feet and has a cute blue patterned dress. The boy version is also white, with brown sock pattern feet, and a cute red tee shirt with a white star and blue shorts. They are all machine washable, with a height of about 20 in. and a width of about 4 in.
Bunny. Photo by Best Years.
Best Years explains that the Pebble Toys (while not specified as organic) have the great quality of being “made in Bangladesh by a workers co-operative which provides fairly paid employment to women in rural locations. This means they do not have to move into Dhaka, where the standards of living are awful.”
Best Years also talks about the actual production process, saying, “To make Pebble Toys, we first start with cotton yarns in a variety of gorgeous colors. Before the toys can be crocheted, yarns are separated out by the ladies. Then the toys are to crochet,” adding that these centers of production are located throughout Bangladesh.
In a new direction, the Under the Nile collection is being produced in Egypt, using soft Egyptian organic cotton. Best Years Director Gaynor Humphrey explained that, “Best Year has a large range of fair trade and handmade knitted and crocheted toys, and we felt that an organic range would fit very well with us.”
Scraptopus. Photo by Best Years.
One of my favorite toys from the Under the Nile collection is the Organic Cotton Scraptopus, which Best Years says “is made with all the soft leftover scraps from our toy collection,” adding that its “easy to hold and safe to chew on.” The toy is made and stuffed with 100 percent GOTS certified organic Egyptian cotton, and is machine washable. It’s 6 in. in size.
Getting back to the Easter theme, the Under the Nile collection also has a great Blue Bunny Blanket Friend. It features knotted hands and feet that make it easy for a baby to hold and teethe. The blanket toy is also made from 100 percent GOTS certified organic Egyptian cotton. It’s 6 in. tall and machine washable.
All of the toys meet the EN71 standard, which is the European safety standard for the design, strength, performance, and labeling of toys.
All of the Best Years toys also meet the CE standard (an abbreviation of the French phrase “Conformité Européene” that literally means “European Conformity”), which shows the manufacturer complies with all applicable safety requirements set by legislation in the European Union. Best Years is a United Kingdom wholesaler, whose toys can be found in retail stores and online.
Reader comment and input are always welcomed!