Teddy Talk: Creating, Collecting, Connecting

Hi all.  I'm trying to catch up on posts since I've been out of town at Disneyland for my anniversary since about 2 a.m. on Thursday, and with NO computer access (talk about withdrawal symptoms; criminies, I've got it bad.) 

One observation:  MAN, but you chicks talk a lot!!!  Laughing here ...  :D

As I have figured out it will be nearly impossible to respond to each thread/post individually, here are a few thoughts I wanted to send out en masse:

---  Quy, your comment about reducing .jpg sizes to actual dimensions rather than scaling down, for speed of website loading, was actually news to me.  Thanks for that!  I've been bugged by the same slow loading problem and I think your comment will provide me the solution. 

---  Welcome to all our wonderful new board participants!  I recognize some of you from the board-whose-name-shall-not-be-mentioned, and others from eBay.  It's great here, with a lot of friendly people, full of talent and warmth and grace.  I learn something new every day.  I'll look forward to your questions and comments!

--- More later, as it's time to relax and unwind after a long day of travel with hubby.

Talk soon,

Sue Ann, your foray into Anime turned out wonderfully.  Very cute, and still very much a "Past Time Bears" original look you've managed.  Darling!

Judi Paul is for sure the lady to answer you on this one.  Didn't she post something here on airbrushing recently?  If not, I saw it on the board-whose-name-shall-not-be-mentioned (very Harry Potter-esque, that.)

If she doesn't pop in here sometime soon you should try her email or find her at her site, Luxembears.  She's been airbrushing for about twenty years and has lots to share on this!

Ooh, I forgot, I have that card too!  People haven't been using PayPal with me of late for the most part, tho, so I forget I even have that option.  Laura is right; you can use any PayPal monies IMMEDIATELY; there is no wait whatsoever to transfer to your bank.

I'm a dodobird, tho, and get confused when I have to track too many accounts, so mostly I just transfer funds and wait for them to show up in my online statement!

Laughing...

Hmmm.  This is a tough one. 

I'm sure you specified in your auction that buyer pays shipping.  And she has, by using PayPal; the funds (including shipping costs) have been promised and sent -- or so it appears from her end anyway -- and it's just YOUR bank holding up the final transfer of cash from her hands to yours.  As she sees it, she has already paid.  So what's your problem, lady? ;):D:P

Well, I understand your "problem" all too well.  Even bear artists who sell regularly and at good prices are not living high on the hog on our bearmaking income.  That means that sometimes, there isn't a spare $70 hanging around in the ol' wallet to cover such a high shipping pricetag.  And, from OUR perspective -- great, wonderful, responsible customer paid right away!  But also -- bank account still missing all funds.

So I get your position completely.

I think if it were a check payment I, personally, would definitely wait until all funds cleared.  You wouldn't KNOW for certain the check was good until it landed in your account.

With PayPal, though, I think I would just fork over the money to cover the lag between the customer payment and the bank delivery of her funds.  There is no question it WILL arrive in your account, in the amount promised.  It's just a question of when.

If I really, truly, literally could NOT afford to cover that lag with my own money, I would actually tell the customer just that.  "I'm having a tight month and although you were wonderful to pay so quickly, the funding for this purchase won't appear in my bank account for four days, so I'm sorry but shipment will have to wait until I have your actual funds in hand."  Something like that.

You're such a sweetie to investigate this problem publicly.  I think you're doing everything just right and have taken no missteps whatsoever.

Probably, it's just the case that -- like most collectors, myself included -- your collector is just monstrously impatient to get her wonderful new Paula Carter teddy!!!!!

Good luck,

Man, you and your George Clooney jones, Penny.  You really have it going on with that guy.  Too cute.

You might have more luck getting adopted by him, tho, if you were a stuffed potbelly pig. I'm sure you're all too familiar with the fact that his relationship with his fat little squeaking friend is, like, the longest and most serious relationship of his adult life. !!!

Wonderful poem!

Ooh, very good point Laura.  Thanks for mentioning it.

I'm not entirely sure how the search engines "spider" -- which is what it sounds like; they send out crawly little tendrils, looking for things -- but I do know they cannot read a .jpg or image file of any kind and can only read text.

They also read keywords, which you can insert as an html "header" in your site programming.  That's where people -- in our case, bear artists -- would include words separated by commas like, "teddy bears, mohair, artist, one of a kind" etc., in the hopes the search engines would glom onto these terms whenever someone inputs them.

Jennifer's business is doing blazingly well -- anyone else see her in Mary Englebriet's Home Companion a while back? -- and as a design purist she might not care as much about spidering as she does about the design of her site.  But I doubt that.  She probably had used white text or lots of keywords to get people to her site, none of which we can see.

I also found out the hard way, after my own website had achieved a certain page ranking, that if you pull your site and replace it with a new one, you lose all of that ranking on the search engines and basically start over from scratch.  What I mean by that is that certain of my website pages -- due to visitor use -- had been "indexed."  Such that, if you typed in "POTBELLY BEARS", my website -- www.potbellybears.com -- was the first on the list to appear.

When I pulled that old site and replaced it with my new one, tho, the indexing got thrown out with the discarded site.  So if you typed in "POTBELLY BEARS', my website appeared on, like, page 18 of the list of matches, after hundreds of other web references had been shown.

I think I've recovered ground over time because I'm back to where searching my company name GETS YOU my company name.... but just something to keep in mind -- a rookie mistake, made by yours truly -- for those of you contemplating doing your own site design and maintenance.

I'm not nearly an expert on this but I'm learning...

Hope this helps,

Yes, that's exactly right Hayley!  My graphic designer friend Andrea told me the same thing when I was setting up my own website.  One must use "web-safe fonts" in the text portion of the site so that everyone, everywhere, regardless of computer age and type and setup, will see the same thing.  That's why my site uses IMPACT and, I think, VERDANA... two of the more common and web-safe fonts.  Others include:

ARIAL
TIMES NEW ROMAN
TREBUCHET
COMIC SANS

Mac offers even more "default" or "standard" fonts but you can never know whether your site is being viewed on a Mac or a Windows/PC, so using the Windows/MicroSoft "web-safe fonts" is the best option.

There is one exception, as you noted... and that's if you embed your text into a photo file and save it as a .jpg, for example.  Jennifer Murphy has a site which I can only assume utilizes just this concept to the fullest.  Her site appears entirely handwritten -- probably is, actually -- and she does not type those words in as text but rather, saves them as photo files.  That's how everyone, everywhere -- even though they do not have Jennifer Murphy's handwriting stored as a font type on their computer -- can see her lovely script handwriting.

Check here to see what I'm talking about, anyone interested: http://www.jmurphybears.com/

And no, the fonts are exactly the same even when used in PhotoShop.  But you then "rasterize" or "simplify" them before saving them to the final version .jpg, and because they are a .jpg, or "picture" -- and not a "font," or text input/html, per se -- everyone, everywhere can see whatever cool, nifty-keeno font you use in your photographs.  So no need, in avatars, etc., to worry about those pesky "web-safe fonts."

Daphne... if you didn't yet compress your layers there should be a way to just highlight the particular layer.  In PhotoShop you simply find it in the layers menu/palette and click on it.  Maybe your program (did you say you use JASC/PaintShop?) allows something similar...???

Copied from Edinburgh reply to Hayley --->

Hmmmm... this one has not happened yet to me. This might be why:

1) I am totally impatient by nature and NEVER wait an entire overnight for my eye paints to dry.    Perhaps they got TOO dry; is such a thing possible? Just brainstorming here...

2) I usually use a first coat of nail polish and a final coat of nail polish... but the coats which actually load color, and which are ultimately scratched off, are acrylic paints sandwiched in between those nail polish coats. The first coat of nail polish is translucent and is metallic or sparkly, to give "punch" and "pop." After that is when I add colors (blue, green, purple, etc.) And the final coat is black polish to seal those acrylics in.

So two suggestions:

a) Work when things are near dry, but not all dry. And work quickly and lightly with that scraping action! I have had chunks peel off at times, but not the entire backing. Just easy up on the scratching part if that's the case.

b) Use acrylic paints for your color application and the polishes only for the first and last layers.

Hope this helps and sorry it didn't work out for you initially!

Hayley and all....  There are a gajillion (yes, that is a REAL number) sites on the net which offer free "true type" fonts.  Two favorites include:

http://www.fontfile.com/fonts.php?thesq … ger_next=1
and
http://www.1001fonts.com/

I can't remember off the top of my head how to install a font -- I want to say you just plunk the file (or download it directly) into the FONT folder in your CONTROL PANEL, but don't quote me.  But it's easy enough to figure out.

Just download the font you want and install it and voila!, you're good to go.  I can "see" all the fonts on my hard drive no matter which application (Word, PhotoShop, etc.) I'm using.  I'm imagining it would be the same for you.

Be sure to have your virus definitions up to date and anti-spyware software installed.  I usually get tagged by something icky when I download free ANYTHING (although I can't specifically blame either of the two sites above, I'd proceed with caution in downloading anything, especially anything FREE, nowadays.)

Have fun!

Hi Lesley and welcome!  I second what SueAnn says; your work is very sweet and terrifically cute. 

I'm sure you'll have lots of great thoughts and ideas to bring to the board.

Hayley... so glad to see you here; welcome!  Millie, your Captain is so majestic.  I showed your before and after pictures to my husband and he was moved to near tears.  We have a cable channel here in the US -- Animal Planet; do you have it too? -- and they often have shows on about animal cruelty (the shows are about the Humane Society in various US cities, and what they deal with day-to-day.)  Anyway, it was lovely to 'know' someone who had taken on one of these neglect/rescue cases for themselves, with such astounding success!

AAARGH!  I hate raccoons.  When my marriage was evaporating I spent too much time sleeping on the sofa and those little buggers would come in through our dog door.  One night I awoke to the tiniest of noises to find this enormous, lumbering, bandit-masked beast staring at me with green-lit, beady eyes.  It swayed back and forth... back and forth... just LOOKING at me, helpless in my flannel jammies on the couch.  I shooed it away and it just looked at me.  I sat up and bolted toward it and it hardly flinched.  I actually had to get to within a foot of it and stomp my feet to get it to ever-so-slowly return to the dog door and make its way back out of the house.

And then, it turned slightly to the right and just stood there for what seemed like an ETERNITY, balefully staring at me through the divided glass of our French doors.

I swear, in that moment I was certain they were the spawn of Satan himself.

A few weeks later, I awoke to hear the most surreal and tinkling laughter coming from the backyard.  I walked to the French doors and looked out, expecting to see a party over the fence.

Instead, what I saw was about ten raccoons having a raccoon party in my backyard!  They were pulling at the net of the kiddie basketball hoop; they were swimming in the plastic pool.  There were two of them rolling left, right, left, right, all over each other, on the grass.  One of them was on the deck banging tiny sand toys together. 

I figured I was either hallucinating or dreaming and for the first time in my life pulled of those "pinch-myself-I-must-be-dreaming" moves, but I was dead awake, and stood there for fully fifteen minutes watching these crazed rodents have an absolute ball of a time in the yard in which my beloved children played.

It took me about two hours to get back to sleep.  I thought they might come in.

In the end, we resorted to competely blocking off the dog door.  They would come to it and scritch/scratch... scritch/scratch... over and over again for the first few nights.  They liked the catfood in the kitchen, you see, which I discovered when they left their pawprints behind all over my new porcelain tile countertops.

And ever since then, I have found them sweet-faced -- yes -- but literally, just about the scariest creatures on earth.  I'd seriously rather pick up a scorpion with bare hands than ever face a raccoon in the dark again.

EEEEEEEKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK!

Jean, Welcome!  Love your door sign.

Thought I'd share a picture and a story about one of my wee animal lovers.

When Toby (now 11) was about five, we were visiting my sister Chanda in San Diego where she used to be stationed with the Navy JAG Corps.  Her apartment complex had a swimming pool and although Toby had barely learned to swim, we were eager to jump in and cool off after a hot day down south.

Before he could even get toe in water, though, Toby spotted a large moth that appeared to be in major distress, drowning in the pool.  Quick as a flash, this little tiny kid -- who himself could barely swim! -- crossed an entire ocean (or so it seemed to his mother) of water to rescue the moth, whom Toby later named, "BOB."

Toby held BOB for some time and we even had a small box in which to rest him as he dried off.  I was pretty sure chlorine-saturated BOB was a total goner, but a few hours later he flitted off into the night.

Toby, bless his sweet little heart, was absolutely distraught at BOB's departure, and bellowed his cries loudly into the night after his rescued moth.  Inconsolable at first, he came around after I told him what a hero he was, to have given "BOB the moth" another shot at life, which would never have been possible if Toby hadn't rescued him.

Here's a picture I was lucky to snap of Toby holding BOB.  He was just as fascinated and happy as he looks here!

Clare, I can reduce a photo for you in about two minutes if you'd like.  Send it to me at:  info@potbellybears.com.

Gail, I keep seeing these eBay auctions for books on Japanese style/primitive bears.  They are even written in Japanese, but you're an experienced bear crafter so I'm sure you could figure it out esp. since it sounds like you're just looking for some guidance on proportions.

I wish I could refer you to a specific title or seller but I've seen these things posted again and again, by various sellers, in the bears>current listings.  Just give it a look -- there, or in bears>supplies -- and I"m sure you'll find what I"m talking about.

If I see it myself, in the meantime, I'll post more specifics here.

Cuuuuuuuuuuuutttttttte!

The things that re-motivate my bearmaking when I get slump-y tend to include: 

--  acquiring new mohair;
--  discovering a new craft skill I can use to accessorize and finish my bears, and then buying/reading a book on it (like beaded flowers, ribbonwork, hatmaking etc.);
--  a look back at all the bears I've completed (I keep a photo catalog for reference and viewing it reminds me of the creativity I'm capable of and how many happy collectors I've touched); and
--  a "for-no-good-reason" trip to a craft or fabric store, where I am instantly overwhelmed with ideas about color combinations, textures, detailing, and themes.

But when none of that will do, and I simply need some escape and some "me" time, I am also invigorated by:

--  a pedicure (with foot massage, of course);
--  chocolate;
--  coffee;
--  a great movie;
--  plopping on the sofa and watching five consecutive episodes of "Sex & the City" with my husband, until the wee hours;
--  coffee, again;
--  finding an excellent bargain on a really cute designer purse/pair of shoes/blouse at a discount store;
--  spicy Thai food;
--  nachos; or
--  a quick day trip to somewhere fantastic and visually stimulating, like San Francisco -- the best city in the world -- where I can get absolutely saturated with culture, faces, colors, and ideas just by breathing in the air.

Wheeeee!  I feel happy already, and I didn't DO any of those things; I just WROTE about them!

Yes, this board IS bear-apy.

Hope this helps!

Miss Rita Drolet, I know your bears.  I've seen your work and recognize your name... from trade magazines, I'm imagining, or perhaps at Bear Paths...?  Maybe in multiple listings on eBay...? 

From somewhere that I frequently haunt in my obsessive quest for devouring knowledge and images of all things bear. 

And I've seen your work many times over, by the way, and those bears of yours have always made a favorable   impression.  They have a wonderfully sweet whimsy to them; I adore bears with that look.  I'd characterize them as terribly, terrifically, totally special, and definately recognizable as one of your own.

I'm with Winney; I'm wondering if maybe you're in a slump and need to try something new.  I, myself, am newly invigorated by some short, sparse, straight, mint green!, mohair in my possession.  (I tend to get a little lost early summer; it coincides with the depressing realization that my kids spend more time, when school's out, with their dad... and thus, not with me.)

Sometimes a tweak here or a new twist there 's all it takes to get mentally and psychologically back on track.  Maybe you could try a bigger size pattern... or a smaller one.  A new kind of mohair?  Larger eyes?  Smaller eyes?  A turned down paw?  A wired limb?  Lids?  Shading?  SOMETHING...!

But whatever you do, don't go to the place that somehow belittles or takes away from your work.  The bears speak for themselves and are full of character and sweetness.  Very much of the sort that "speaks" to people, in little tiny squeaky voices.  Just what you, as the artist, would want.  They're lovely.

Keep up the good work and know we're here to support you when you get down.  It's a lovely group here.  They will become your fast friends, I'm certain.

My husband "thinks'" he sees a pattern of my light bears -- particularly VERY light ones, like cream, ivory, or white -- selling quicker and thus "better," and for higher prices, than my darker bears.

Does anyone else notice a pattern in collector preferences? 

Do you have a preference:  light vs. dark bears?

I actually collect a style of of bear very unlike my own creations.  I tend to like the kinda sparse, scruffy, old-fashioned types of bears, with black eyes, and with a lot of whimsy to them.  But my hands, heart, and mind prefer MAKING contemporary, very facially-detailed, bears, in thick lush furs, and using not too many dark colors.

Anyway, the question is... what's your poison: light or dark?

Most of my collected bears are... a midtone.  I don't feel very drawn to super-light bears -- including polars, although I do like pandas -- that's for sure.  And a lot of very dark bears lack sufficient detail to draw me in for that requisite closer look.  So many of my collected pieces are in a midtone range, and almost every one of them is in a brownish tone.

Ooohhh... Millie, that's a great idea for a new topic.  Will post now.  I'm on fire lately!!!  Cracking up here...

I always get nervous with each new bear, too.. makes it hard to start one.  But once I start, I can't STOP.  I need therapy.

BEAR-apy, maybe!

:D:P

Well HELLO -- finally! -- Miss Kirsten Evans, and welcome!!!

Love the avatar, by the way.  The pawprint is a great touch; is it a photo of the avatar bear's footpad?  Your bears are turning out really great!  WHy, I remember when you were just a shy beginner... (like I should talk :))

I'm glad you came by and am sure you'll enjoy it here.  It's a great bunch.

Ahhhhh.  Chuffed = "stoked"

Gotcha. 

Thanks!