Think back to your childhood.

To Christmas mornings, and birthdays...

To making a rare visit to your favourite toy shop...

Think of the toys you loved to play with, or longed to find in your Christmas stocking.

Chances are, if, like me, you are of a certain age, that looking back invokes memories of toys which were of an altogether superior standard to today's offerings.

Toys were sturdier, better made, from traditional materials. They were often hand-made, and usually had some educational or instructional purpose.

I remember dolls, only a few, but wonderfully dressed and often with their own lovely real porcelain tea sets (I still have one of those carefully wrapped and stored out of harm's way in the attic)

I remember a lovely painted wooden box, filled with picture blocks and accompanied by 6 beautifully illustrated sheets to show the finished fairy tale scenes.

I remember wonderful wooden jigsaws, carefully stored in their sturdy cardboard boxes, which never failed to entertain no matter how many times they were put together.

I remember card games, board games, books of fairy tales, paper dolls, magic painting sets, a scaled down version of a real typewriter, an inspirational post office set with a real wood counter, metal scales, rubber stamps and all the necessary paraphernalia to allow my dolls to buy postal orders, post their letters and postcards, and pay their pocket money into their savings books.

Not a scrap of pink plastic in sight. No need for batteries. No requirement for a degree in construction engineering just to get into the packaging. Just well made, appealing toys, built to withstand the rigours of childhood and provide not just a few hours, but often many years of pleasurable play. No wonder then that my favourite miniatures are tiny toys and it is Victorian/Edwardian toys that I collect most avidly.

It is now a fact that almost everything in our full scale world can be found in the miniature world, and toys are no exception. My very first 'adult' doll's house, built from a DHE kit 23 years ago was an all-consuming passion, and it should be no surprise that the nursery/playroom was the first room to be completed and was crammed with all manner of toys and games long before any of the other rooms were even furnished!

Over the course of the next few decades, the grip of miniature mania tightened its hold and at the zenith of my obsession I had 17 dolls houses of various historical periods and styles, plus several shops, a chapel, a garden with working stream and waterfall and various other follies.

However, despite the fact that the houses, irrespective of their period, always had a nursery, with toys appropriate to the era, I never had a toyshop.

Bit of an oversight perhaps, but you will understand that 17 dolls houses, each with a nursery, requires a lot of toys, and I never quite had the heart to either take any toys out of the existing houses or to start again with a new collection.

However, in the fullness of time, my fanatical obsession matured, via zealous enthusiasm, to keen and abiding interest. Subsequent downsizing and house moves meant that many of my houses had to find new homes themselves, and my final magnum opus, my much loved Scottish baronial mansion was finally sold two years ago, and the thousands of individual pieces from my collection took a whole year to sell on eBay!

Well not quite my whole collection. I couldn't part with all the lovely tiny toys I had collected over 25 years. Many of them were made by craftsmen no longer trading, or bought from artisans who were subsequently 'discovered' and whose miniatures are now completely outside my budget. Some were simply incredibly lucky finds from exhibitors at dolls house fairs who have never been seen since.

My miniature toy collection has resided in several boxes, carefully tissue-wrapped, and only occasionally seeing the light of day.

However, last Christmas morning, in a delightful flashback to childhood Christmases, I found under the tree, a wonderful three storey shop kit, which I have been slowly building, adapting, electrifying and 'distressing' over the past year.

Needless to say it will be a toy shop&&&.a wonderful late Victorian toy shop, filled to bursting with all manner of tiny toys and curiosities.

You can follow my progress (or sometimes the lack of it) on my blog, which documents the building of the toy shop over the past 10 months.

www.http://towerhousedolls.blogspot.com

I now design and hand craft a whole range of miniature toys in the Victorian style, from tiny dolls to teddy bears, marotte toys to jack-in-the-boxes, pullalong toys to marionettes, some of which are photographed here.

I hope to be able to offer some of these as forthcoming Dolls House Artisan projects.