GIANT bear!

We've had a few requests over the years to release bigger ePatterns for our bears. But I honestly didn't have many over the 20" mark because there's not a lot of demand for bigger artist bears (cost/shipping/materials etc).

But this week I decided to give it a go. After all I have a whole supply stores worth of fabric at my disposal (thanks Fur Addiction! lol), so had a bit of flexibility to play around a bit.

I pulled out some of my older big bear patterns from about a decade ago, but the biggest one was only 27". So we drew up a new one. The photo above shows the cut pieces laid in position. It looked like the bear might come to about 35" tall. It took just under a full 1m piece to make (approx a yard of fabric). We used 'Aurora Borealis' for this bear.

I then managed to use ALL of my stuffing just on the head. So this was as far as I got on the first day of work. Poor teddy had to spend the night crammed into a tub while she waited for me to source some more stuffing!

Then the next day we had an unexpected urgent custom request (which is a little bit secret right now - but I have taken lots of photos and hope to be able to show you all sometime in the near future. Think iconic aussie animal and TV!), so poor teddy got neglected again. But today I was able to finish stuffing her, then closed her seams, pulled and shaded her toes and finished off her detailing.

And this was the beauty we were rewarded with!

I've called her 'Kittie'. Mostly because she's wearing a STUNNING moveable faux diamond gold-tone kitty pendant I've just been dying to use on a bear. And also because I love how it conjures up images of tiny little fluffy creatures, yet here we have this incredible monstrosity of a bear!

It really can be hard to tell proportions on the bears sometimes, so for this big girl I decided to take a 'selfie' with her to help show her true size better. I am not a small person by any stretch of the imagination either (at nearly 6 foot tall) so even I dwarf her a bit! But as you can see - she is big!

She has already been adopted, but we will be trialing this pattern again with some different fabrics to make sure it is versatile and the proportions don't look weird in say mohair, or a short-pile faux fur before we release it. So keep checking back at the blog (or head on over to our facebook page) to keep up with the next lot of work-in-progess updates!