How to Build a Wooden Toy Truck

How to build a personalized wooden toy truck

So, you'd like to build a personalized wooden toy truck. Done right, your personalized wooden toy truck will make a great educational baby toy or entertaining toy for toddlers. Let's get started!

Things You'll Need

• Wooden toy truck from craft store
• Paints to personalize wooden toy truck
• Paint brushes

Instructions

1. Buy your wooden toy truck. Sure, you could build the wooden toy truck from scratch, but that'll require a lot of tools and a fully stocked wood shop. Instead, by buying the wooden toy truck already made, you can spend your time personalizing it for your child. (Especially for a toy for children, you'll spend a lot of time sanding if you decide to make the truck from scratch.)

2. Buy milk paints to paint and personalize your wooden toy truck. Milk paints are nice because they're nontoxic making them a good choice for baby educational toys and toddler toys. You can buy milk paints online or at some local paint stores (call ahead, not everyone carries them).

3. Decide on your painting pattern for your wooden toy truck. Will you paint polka dots? Stripes? Solid colors? Perhaps you'll also add your child's name to turn the wooden toy truck into an heirloom toy. For baby educational toys specifically, remember baby's eyes respond really well to lots of contrast.

4. Mask out your pattern or sketch it onto your wooden toy truck if you don't want to freehand the design. Using masking tape makes adding even a complicated pattern really easy. Take your time preparing to paint for a long lasting baby educational toy heirloom.

5. Paint! This is the fun step. Milk paints are slightly transparent, so paint your lightest colors first for best results. Don't worry if you don't stay within the lines as it's the imperfections that make your baby educational toy clearly handmade with love. In fact, it's those imperfections that will make your child cherish the toy all the more as a grown up!

Tips & Warnings

• Consider painting a whole fleet of personalized wooden toy trucks. There are many different shapes available and your child can have great fun building roads and cities with plenty of trucks to make deliveries.

• Making (or personalizing) your own baby educational toys is fun and rewarding!