A classic, open ended building toy has a new twist via vibrantly colored, wood cylinders, cubes, and triangular prism blocks and little wood trays. Builders of all ages can create an infinite number of abstract and representational structures and play with the connections between color and form. The design was inspired by a survey conducted at the Bauhaus by the artist and teacher, Wassily Kandinsky, on the relationship between basic forms and primary colors. Designed by Karen Hewitt for the Museum of Modern Art [MoMA] Design Stores in conjunction with the Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity exhibition. Set includes 9 hardwood blocks in 3 primary colors, 9 small hardwood trays, 1 hardwood tray/container, and descriptive booklet. Winner of the Best Picks 2009 Dr. Toy Award.

Inquisitive hands will transform Villetta into a village of colorful cottages, a tower of balancing prisms, or an abstract sculptural masterpiece. This artful open-ended building toy expands the possibilities of building ideas never before imagined. The color, form and sheer beauty of Villetta will attract young children as well as artists, designers and playful adults. "With a beautiful array of vibrant colors, this block set combines the function of an open-ended classic wooden toy to be played by generations of children, yet also has the aesthetic appeal to attract designers, artists, architects, and playful adults," Karen Hewitt, president/designer of Learning Materials Workshop, told TDmonthly. Launch date: September 2011.

Coloraturo, a new block set created by award winning toy designer Karen Hewitt, will delight and captivate the imagination of children and artists of all ages. This smart toy functions both as a designer art piece and a high quality children’s building toy providing endless experiences with color in both two and three dimensions. The color, form and sheer beauty of Coloraturo will attract young children as well as architects, designers and playful adults. "Displaying 36 unique, vibrant colors, this piece stands out from ordinary block sets, yet will still be a timeless toy for generations of children. This toy will provide endless building opportunities, yet looks beautiful enough to display anywhere in the house," Karen Hewitt, president/designer of Learning Materials Workshop, told TDmonthly. Launch date: September 2011.
Awards: TDmonthly Top Toy Award, January 2012; 2011 Dr. Toy 10 Best Creative Products Award; 2011 Dr. Toy 100 Best Children's Products Award.
— Why it won: Beautifully designed, kids can enjoy hours of pattern play, color sorting, and building. Meanwhile, parents won't mind having these colorful, geometric blocks left lying around.

Prismatic contains a variety of brightly colored hardwood prisms and hand-polished acrylic prisms that fit into square boxes. Children create simple and complex designs that help them think about order, pattern, and symmetry. Children also experience the beauty and wonder of the color spectrum when light refracts through the acrylic prisms that form part of their inventive buildings and designs. Contains 30 hardwood prisms (natural finish), 36 hardwood prisms (in 6 colors), 6 clear acrylic prisms, and 1 hardwood tray.
Awards— Dr. Toy’s Best Classic Toys for 2011

This product is designed so that young toddlers will delight in placing the dowel/balls in the holes, turning the base, and watching the whirling forms turn around. Older toddlers can start to build with the hardwood squares, put “red hats on the red heads," and stack colored shapes into sturdy towers. Preschoolers can build more complex and imaginative structures while exploring how motion changes the appearance and stability of forms. "Torno Torno combines a wood building toy with a wood turn-table base that is activated by the child — no batteries, just the child's gentle push and imagination," Karen Hewitt, president of Learning Materials Workshop, told TDmonthly. This product was named one of Dr. Toy's 10 Best Toys 2009. Launch date: November 2009.

The collection of modular boxes increases perceptual and motor skills, stimulates language development, provokes mathematical thinking and nurtures aesthetic ideas and imaginative play.
Children recognize that these beautiful little boxes are perfect for storing their special collections, building high towers or long slinky roads, framing their pictures and photographs and much more,” Learning Materials Workshop Sales and Marketing Director Meg Walker told TDmonthly. Launch date: 2008.

This set allows individuals to build with light, color and shadow. Four jewel-like, transparent, acrylic prisms are housed in a natural hardwood tray with a series of color optical filters and reflective mylar squares. The opportunities for experimenting with color mixing and constructing brilliantly colored architectural and sculptural forms are endless. Imagine the possibilities.

Created by award-winning designer Karen Hewitt, TINTE is both an art object and a toy that appeals to children and playful adults. As an interactive art object, the myriad design combinations become intriguing, two-dimensional works of art, equally at home on the living room wall or a child’s bedroom. As TINTE is both a plaything and educational toy, builders of all ages delight in constructing three-dimensional structures with TINTE’s 42-color, modular, hardwood blocks while exploring the basics of color theory: hue, value and intensity. The product comes with a hardwood frame with a sliding Plexiglas cover. An illustrated booklet on color theory is included. Launch date: March 2007.

Revolving gently or standing still like a "theatre in the round", Carosello is both a construction set and a platform for children to invent and stage stories or construct moving sculptural forms. Children can take apart and put together the brightly colored wood dowels, bobbins, balls, and bendable Mylar to create a changing world where shapes look different from various viewpoints, where new forms appear and disappear, straight lines become curves, colors bend, structures reflect and stories unfold.