Teddy Talk: Creating, Collecting, Connecting

Oh, gee, you're most welcome...!  No need for public accolades. :/:P;):o:D

It was great fun and I like to practice my new PhotoShop skills.

Thought I'd throw a new topic into the mix.

When I create I never know, at the start point, whether I'll end up with a girl or boy bear.  They generally "tell" me -- those fuzzy little buggers --  as I go along exactly how they'd like to turn out.  I seem to end up with more girls than boys.

How about you all...???

"Chuffed" sounds like a skin condition involving abraded, reddened skin.  <heehee> You know, like, "My hands are so CHUFFED from all that dishwashing." 

PS  I don't wash dishes.  That's what the dishwasher is for.

Copyright is a tricky issue.  If I weren't rushing out the door I'd tell you more specifics. 

A couple points:

Copyright is automatic; you don't need to "register" for anything to have a copyright on your unique and original work.  It applies, I think, to anything recorded (writings, photos, patterns, etc.)

North Country Teddy Bears (Google it as I REALLY have to go and can't find the URL right now, sorry), run by Nancy Tillberg, is a wonderful resource.  I think she has an article posted somewhere there about copyright.  I've read it myself; it's quite good.  Check it out.

Byeeeeeeeeee til later today...!

You girls are the most literate, talented, witty, passionate group of people I've "never" met.  What a bright spot to every day my visit(s) to this forum have become.

Never stop!

I'm generally a fan of the mid to darker toned neutrals myself, but have strayed on occasion into tipped mohair -- going wild there, Shel; slow down! -- and one particularly handsome batik guy.  This week, tho, I am straying WAAAAAAAAY out of bounds and working on a very short pile, very straight pile, medium sparse pile, bear... in mint green!  I honestly can't wait to see how it turns out.  I'm terrified.  I will do my best.

I do have some ideas for finishing this bear even before it's nearly finished, so I'm hoping that it will be a girl bear or  it will have a very hard time wearing the pink flowers I'm envisioning with head held high.

What a terrific topic, Sue Ann.  And Marie, I can just HEAR your beautiful, lilting accent when I read your wonderful stories.  Your English is fantastic.  Here is everthing I know in French, pour vous:  poivre vert.  I used to live in Zurich, you see, where Migros sold grocery products labelled in all three Swiss languages (French, German, and Italian.)  My entire French vocabulary is mostly food items.  Food, and that famous line from that famous song that should probably go unmentioned here...

So on to the question at hand.

Animal lover here!  Pick me, pick me!

We have three cats, three dogs (ginormous to tiny sizes), a ball python, and an eyelash gecko named Malcolm.  Malcolm is very cool.  I like him a lot.  He eats baby food with a giant tongue that he can use to lick his eyeballs.  Seriously.  I could watch him for hours.  He's ridiculous with that eye licking thing.

Anybody else...???

Daphne, I love your shaded bear.  But then again, I'm biased toward the shading thing.  I do not think it looks like a raccoon.  And over time you'll experiment with placement of your shading -- closer to the eye, farther from, in different patterns (tear shaped, circular, just under the eye, etc.) -- and will come up with your best "look."

It's an itty, bitty file, sized to use as an avatar at 72dpi, which is why I can't figure it out either.  I'll try again in a bit.  Maybe it was just a fluke thing over the day or so I resent it repeatedly.

Talk later!

Which reminds me, Laure... I've been trying to email you an avatar but your program keeps telling me it's too big and returning it undeliverable.  How do we get around that?

I don't want a bestest FIEND... I have of those already, in the form of my husband.  How bout being my bestest FRIEND instead...???

:P:D

Aw, that's very sweet, Penny... but I am really not all that computer literate, I swear it.  It's not false modesty.  I fumble and stumble around like everyone else; I just have greater tolerance for staying up really late! 

Let me know if/how I can help in any way as you move forward and I'll do my best to assist where I can.

You can also just use metallic paint.  I buy mine in a little strip of pots -- there are, like, ten little pots in the strip -- at Michael's.  The entire thing comes packaged in plastic on one of those hanging cardboard thingamajigs.  You can buy primary colored strips... sparkle strips... and metallic strips.  Oh, and neon strips.  And some others, too, I think, for specialty work, like "neutral colors" strips.

The only part where I would NOT use paint is the very last coat or backing.  I always use nail polish and I always suse something very, very dark -- usually black.  It really does wonders to seal all those acrylics and keep them from running or rubbing off when you insert your eye into a Fray-Checked hole.

Hope this helps!

I didn't do all of them but I can claim a few! 

I hope someday to gather clientele for my budding (but still very rookie) design skills but, for now, would love to make one for you both (Louise, Danni.)  Send me a good photo -- preferably looking straight on -- and let me know your color/style preferences and I'll see what I can do.

They are done, by the way, in a graphics program.  I happen ot use PhotoShop 7.0 but there are many other options if you'd like to tinker around with such a thing yourself.  PhotoShop Elements is, I hear, a wonderful program, with much of the functionality of the big PhotoShop program that I use available for users, but in a somewhat "simpler" format (PhotoShop is a very hard program to learn and I think I could spend ten hours a day learning it and still be learning twenty years from now.)

Find me at:  info@potbellybears.com

Glad I could help!

Butt-long hair?  French braids? Inmates?  Take-downs?

I feel somehow I'm missing a piece of this story, Dilu... and I so hate being out of the loop.  Please, fill me in!

Aw, man... no fair!  Please e-mail me privately because I MUST know what happened... info@potbellybears.com :P;)

Millie... I hear you!

I'd never, ever turn a critical eye on a working mother, because you're absolutely right; many do not have the choice to stay home.  I also feel no judgement toward those mothers who are spiritually and emotionally healthier if they maintain interests outside the home and so ALSO choose to work while raising their kids.  I think it's about what works for each individual, and for each individual situation.  In the end, if mom and dad are rewarded and happy and financial stresses are low -- whatever it takes to get that -- the kids have a better chance of being happy and comfortable, which is the end goal for most parents anyway.

But for ME, being an at-home-mom was a lifepath choice from a very early age.  I remember wanting that more than any other thing.  And you're right; those growing-up moments are gone all too quickly -- my older son, 11, is nearly my height (5'6"); when did THAT happen?!? -- and I'm just soul-enriched and delighted that I've been present and available to witness nearly all of them. 

My sons and I are also extremely fortunate that their dad is a mostly very good guy, who also happens to be quite wealthy because he's smart and worked very hard for a very long time to become a Partner in his firm (workaholic tendencies = our divorce, actually; I was lonely being "single" and tired of being a "single" mom), and assists our financial health with regular child support payments that I NEVER, EVER have to chase down.  And, I'm equally fortunate to have found my soulmate in my second husband, whose income (in addition to my own) also helps create an environment where I can stay home.

Not everybody gets these opportunities/choices, and I just support and applaud the hard job of motherhood in all its forms, because moms -- kid moms, dog moms, cat moms, bear moms... seriously -- are just the best kind of people on Earth.

Penny, your post made me absolutely laugh out loud.

Did I mention that my "working outside the home" qualifications, for that job I ended up not needing to get thanks to my bearmaking,  include a Master's degree in Education and a multiple-subject/elementary school teaching credential?!? :P:D

Having said that, I agree completely with your "bag of hammers" comment;  at least as applied to SOME teachers.  My younger son is having a particularly difficult year and it's mostly due to a boring, skill/drill/kill, negativity-saturated teacher, and very little to do with him or his classmates, who are blamed for every bad moment he has.  Ugh.

No matter how you look at it, tho, teaching -- even for boring, negative people -- is a very difficult job, set in a very political arena, where it's literally quite impossible to satisfy kids/parents/administration/city council/chamber of commerce/governor/president/church/GOD all at the same time -- and this is pretty much the task assigned to teachers/schools nowadays -- because it is, in the end, individuals teaching individuals, in an institution where dogma gets... well... institutionalized.  Very frustrating, all of it, and all of it designed to take place with nowhere near the financial backing required to make even the most basic of things actually FUNCTION.  Don't get me started.

Thanks for the laugh... :D:D

That's hysterical!  I'm still recovering, myself, from that huge ol' fib about my elephant, PINKY.  The things that traumatize us.  But thank goodness, because otherwise folks like my husband -- who is a therapist -- would be out of a job!!! :D:D

I wanna play...

I've always been one of those crafty types and one day in fall 2003 I decided, just on a whim, "What the heck? -- I've never made a teddy bear.  Might be time to try." 

So I bought a pattern at JoAnne's and made this GIGANTIC bear, three feet or so tall, which was designed to be unjointed but which I WANTED to be jointed, anyway -- I'm so dang contrary sometimes -- so I string jointed it with these giant buttons.  Can you imagine?  The thing weighs, like, ten pounds, he's so full of stuffing -- which stretched the plush felt I used to make him from totally out of shape, I might add -- and he's got string joints.  I'm surprised he's not losing limbs left and right.

When I was finished with him -- and it took me forever, because while I'm a lifelong crafter, I am NOT a lifelong seamstress -- I looked him hard in the face and thought, "Dang, he's ugly."

Being something of a perfectionist, I was determined that he would not be my last attempt at bearmaking, and knew that my character and personality demanded that I keep going until I got to a final outcome that I could deem, "Just right."

So I scoured the internet, and our local used book store -- which had an odd number of teddy-bear-making books on its shelves; thank God and fate for that -- and I researched.  And I mean researched, like spending hour upon hour upon hour upon hour checking out websites (Michelle Lamb's in particular; she was and is a huge inspiration in my work... but also Lora Soling, and Victoria Dickinson, and Jane Perala, and Karen O'Brien... just to name a few early influences and inspirations.)

I used a pattern from a book for bear two, which was also hideous, and then started creating individual pieces -- body, limbs, finally a head -- across the next few bears.  I think it was by around bear five -- still, hideously misshapen, out of proportion, and with a face only a mother could love -- that I was creating my own patterns entirely, and learning to work with "fur;" meaning the cheapy synthetics you can grab at the craft store, at the time.

After about fifteen bears I had developed something of an individual style and things were coming together bear-wise.  Serendipitously, it was around this same time that financial circumstance was forcing me to consider re-entering the working world after over a decade as an at-home mom -- something I had hoped to keep doing, as my primary "work" focus, for at least several more years, until both my sons had finished elementary school (and we still have 2+ years to go on that!)

I realized that, with all that research, I had accrued a certain familiarity with eBay sellers and pricepoints... retailers... and sort of a "feel" for what the collecting audience -- myself included, by the way! -- seemed to like, and I thought, "Why not try selling a bear?  Maybe I could make a go of THIS as a career.  Maybe that dumb ol' adage IS true... that if you find something you love doing, the money will follow!!!"

I was waaaaaaaaay too chicken, as a total unknown, to put myself out there on eBay and risk total annihilation.  But with the anonymity allowed me by the medium known as "the Internet," I somehow found the courage to contact a retailer with some photos and ask, "Would you be willing to associate with a newbie like me and sell my bears?"  And to my surprise and delight, she agreed... and by March of 2004 my teddies made their official debut at Bear Paths.

All of this has opened doors for me to friendship, to personal growth on so many fronts, to a feeling that effort CAN equal outcome (and it IS a lot of effort; I've spent many, many after-midnight hours working on my bears, and still do.)  It's like a dream, and I have been able to create a "resume" of skills and experiences that showcase a passion and a drive and pro-activity that I'm proud to call my own, and that can only help me as I move on in my life, should I eventually have to find employement elsewhere -- which, living in very expensive California, I might.

-->  And this brings me to a total aside.  I was watching this TV show the other night about "What 500K Buys Across the US" and even tho I knew New York was pricey, I had NO IDEA that it took 500K to buy a 620 square foot -- 620!!! -- fourth-floor walk-up in the West Village.  AARGH!!!!  Location, location, location, yes -- and tons of charm.  But 500K for 620 square feet?!?!?  Even for a lifelong Cali girl like me, that figure is absolutely stunning!

Anyway... I love my bearmaking.  I'm glad I "fell" into it.  I'm delighted to have met so many wonderful people, and to have this great blessing to be able to do something I purely and totally love, and get paid for it, so I can take my kids to Disneyland, or buy them iTunes, or ... whatever.  Life my life.  All because of bears, which allow me to stay home and BE HERE for them, which, frankly, was always my main "career" goal in the first place.  It's a great, if tiring!, job, motherhood.  Bears make it possible for me to STAY TIRED doing it for a while longer...!

Hey, it was fun to share this.  Thanks for letting me! ;)

Rita, that rat is TOO CUTE!  I love his little herringbone attire.  Very nice!!

I had a Cookie Monster with googly eyes that made a little sandy sound when they wobbled.  He went to bed with me and got all matted and blicky.  But I think he was a little bit affectation, because I WANTED to have a Cookie Monster special somebody to sleep with.

My real first stuffed love would therefore have to be PINKY, the elephant.  He was about ten inches tall  , made of pink cotton with white polka dots, and was created to be almost totally flat... kinda like a flounder, with one eye on each side of him.  He had only a single ear that you could flip to one side or the other, depending on which of his sides you were looking at (since you couldn't look at him head-on due to his inherent flatness.) 

I was very recently delighted to find a new "retro" version of my PINKY at our local, very cool boutique gift store, in the baby toy section.

One day when I was little, we travelled to Wisconsin by car from California -- my folks are Madison born and raised and moved to Cali in their thirties before I was born.  Once there, PINKY was nowhere to be found.  My mom told me that he must have gotten misplaced on the trip.  Of course, I was heartbroken.  But I survived, and grew up a little at the same time.

Imagine my surprise -- and horror! -- to discover PINKY a year or two ago in the cedar chest my folks gave me for safekeeping.  I learned two things that day:

1)  PINKY lives! and,
2)  Moms lie!

:D:D

Judi, as you know, I've heard you tell this story before.  What you might not know, though, is that your grace and compassion and eloquence always inspire me.  That such qualities could spring from such a tragic loss is astounding... and wonderful.  I'm so glad for you and your family, and the healing process attached to both, that you were able to find a creative, aesthetically beautiful, sweet and cuddly way to celebrate Hayden and the entirety of the family that loves him, despite the mourning and sadness and real sense of, "this didn't need to happen" incredulity that surrounds it all.  You bring honor to everyone with your forgiveness, and your desire to focus on remembrance of all that was good and kind.

Big hugs to YOU, Judi. :):)

You vacuum EVERY DAY???