John Crane's TIDLO High Tea Shape Matching from Butterflies & Dragons

I want to start by telling you all about a fantastic website that I found called Butterflies and Dragons. They are a website selling the most amazingly gorgeous toys I have ever laid eyes on!

You can see for yourself just how vast an array of beautiful toys they sell on their website: www.butterfliesanddragons.co.uk
There are toys for all ages and interests from fabulous wooden toys to dressing up and children's room decorations. There is something for everyone and you will love browsing their fantastic website as much as I did!

Tidlo High Tea Shape Matching

Butterflies & Dragons sell lots of fabulous wooden toys which is fantastic in this day and age as I have always found it so difficult to find somewhere that sells high quality wooden toys at an affordable price. They sent Lexi this gorgeous High Tea Shape Matching Set from TIDLO Timeless Toys by John Crane to review.

"Tidlo High Tea Shape Matching is a brightly coloured, two-tier cake stand, featuring 15 attractively designed cakes. An educational wooden toy that supports early counting skills, and helps to develop shape matching and spatial awareness. Each cake has a number on the base to match into the correctly shaped base on the cake stand. The yummy, pretend cakes look good enough to eat! A fantastic toy for pretend play and for kitchen role play games. The High Tea Shape Sorting toy encourages a child to think about numbers and shapes whilst they are playing"

I am amazingly bad at DIY so when I saw how simple it was to put the cake together I was really pleased. The cake stand was in 4 pieces which simply screwed together using the allen key which was provided then it was ready to play!

The Set consists of a gorgeous pink cake stand along with 15 brightly coloured differently shaped and numbered cakes. The idea is that Lexi had to put the correctly numbered and shaped cake back onto it's rightful shaped hole on the cake stand.

The cake stand is very sturdy and well made and, even with Lexi being in a destructive stage, she didn't manage to damage it at all. The paint and wood is still looking just as beautiful as when I gave it to her a week ago! She manages to break just about everything else so this really does prove the quality of the toy perfectly!

The 15 individual wooden cakes are beautifully made in lots of gorgeous, bright, eye-catching colours with beautiful attention to detail and thought put into each and every cake from cherries on top, brandy snaps all chocolatey and delicious looking to mouth-watering cream details and melon slices and strawberries. Each cake looks good enough to eat!

Lexi had so much fun sorting the cakes into a line on the table then finding the correct numbers and shapes to put them back on the stand.

Height of cake stand 29.5cms, Diameter is 25cms



The stand has 2 tiers so it made it a little more challenging and Lexi absolutely loved it. She kept calling it "Mummy's Cake" because I originally played with the cake set with her with her dolly and we had afternoon tea so when we divided the cakes into Mummy's, Lexi's and dolly's; Lexi remembered which ones were Mummy's cakes and still now calls those ones Mummy's which is really cute!



After we had played at afternoon tea, Mummy and Lexi set about sorting the cakes into their correct positions on the cake stand and Lexi "Miss Independent" wasn't letting Mummy do it as she wanted to show how much of a big girl she was by being able to do it all by herself. The toy has an advisory of age 3 but Lexi has only just turned 2 and was more than capable of sorting the cakes and playing with the toy properly.

I will definitely be buying one of these as a gift for a child younger than 2 as it really does help their motor skills. Lexi's counting and recognition of numbers has improved immensely since we began playing with the High Tea Shape Matching Set! Her spatial recognition, hand eye co-ordination and communication and role play have certainly improved too. I am very, very impressed with how much fun Lexi had with the High Tea Matching Set whilst learning and developing at the same time!

Not only did Lexi absolutely love the High Tea Shape Matching Set but I have to say that the service we received from Butterflies & Dragons was superb; I can't fault their Customer Service or customer satisfaction one little bit; I spoke to one of them who was very polite, well mannered and couldn't do enough for us in the way of arranging delivery or choosing the best review item for Lexi after I told them the sorts of toys she liked best. They couldn't have chosen better - she absolutely adores the High Tea Shape Matching!

The High Tea Shape Matching set is available to buy from the Butterflies & Dragons website here http://www.butterfliesanddragons.co.uk/tidlo-high-shape-matching-p-1058.html for £24.95 which I think is a very reasonable price for a toy which will last a long time and bring years of fun and learning!

Thank you Butterflies & Dragons for superb Customer Service and for sending us such a brilliant toy for Lexi to review. Your company and most of all your toys are very much Loved By Lexi.