Halloween Collection 2013

Aww, look how sweet these 5 little cuties are. How are they Halloween bears...? 

THIS is how!!! These creepy little guys are the other-side of the bears in the first photo, made from our bizarre and unique 'Flop-About-Bear' design. We've used handmade Russian glass eyes and added droopy layers of sculpted polymer clay eye-lids to help with the effect. Given them 'rotting' embroidered noses, ultra suede fangs, balding patches and repair/stitch effects.

This little guy is 'Raven', made in our 'Forest Dweller' dark matted mohair.

This is 'Salem', made in our crimson/black tipped mohair 'Queen of Hearts'.

This is 'Hades', made in our 'Red Brick' matted mohair.

This is 'Fang', made in our 'Sahara' matted mohair.

And this 'Igor', made in our 'Dried Apricot' matted mohair.

Elephants EVERYWHERE!

Almost exactly a week ago my hubby Mark and I sat down with some pieces of mohair and had a brainstorming session. My plan was to create a couple of teds in various sizes out of the same fur, but Mark had the brilliant idea to make them elephants - specifically a whole family of elephants!

So we got to work printing out various sizes of our Elephant pattern to achieve this look. We ended up with two in the original 9" size, one in a 115% enlargement (ended up at 11"), one at a 130% enlargement (13"), one at 80% reduction (ended up at 7" tall) and two at a 55% reduction (ended up a petite 5" tall).

(This can be done with nearly all of our instant download e-patterns. Just play with the percentage settings before you print. The seam allowances will automatically decrease/increase with the pattern pieces. So as long as you follow the same proportions there the altered pattern will work just as well as the original)

This is how bizarre elephants look without eyes and ears!

But we quickly remedied that! It literally took ALL week, but slowly little elephant faces started to peer back at me...

(closing the last seams late this afternoon)

I had busted my butt to get all 7 of these guys done before the kindy pick up (so I could get photos before the kids got home and wanted to 'help'!), but I got outside to my photo-spot and the lighting was TERRIBLE! I nearly had a little tantrum. I'd worked so hard to get them ready in time. But I didn't. I vented to Mark in the car on the way to the kindy, and by the time we had the kids and were driving home I'd totally gotten over it. I decided to give it one more go, but if the light was still crappy - the photos would just have to wait until the next morning.

But the light was good again! And we managed to get these lovely photos of all the elephants.

From largest to smallest we have:

Estelle Elephant - 13" (SOLD)

Ella Elephant - 11"

Esme Elephant - 9"

Edgar Elephant - 9"

Evie Elephant - 7"

Elsie Elephant - 5" 

Elmo Elephant - 5"

Pink and Green

I had a bit of fun with some experiemental mohair dyeing again recently, and ended up with two pieces of long pile mohair in a soft floral pink and a rather vibrant lime green. 

The pink was lovely. But the green was a little brighter then I had imagined  it would be. But I decided to see  how the two colours would work together. 

This little lady was one of the resulting bears. We've called her 'Sweet Dreams' after a variety of small pink rose. She stands in at 14" tall and is actually made in our 'Lyric' pattern, just reduced down to 85% to give us a slightly smaller bear.

She's currently available in our etsy store.

~*~

And this little lady is 'Hydrangea'. Also named after flowers - this time a little less obscure. I found an example of the flowers that inspired this bear through a google search - I love the way all the individual flowers make the ball shape.

Very much like this bear's head!

Hydrangea is also currently available in our etsy store.

NEW pattern - just released for YOU!

So THIS is the new pattern I've been banging on about for the last few blog posts. It's not really a 'new' pattern in the sense that I designed it a number of years ago and have used it to create MANY different bears. But it is new in that we've just gotten it back from our graphic designer - and it's now a very snazzy looking PDF pile for you to download, print and make your own 'Belarius' bears!
(available as an instant download in our etsy store)

This is one of the most recent bears I have made using this pattern - we called him 'Belarius'. So I decided to use his name to christen the design. Up until this point the pattern was just 'that big bendy bear', recognised in my crappy pattern filing system by the recycled paper I used when I drew him out that first time!

I've used this design so many times over the last few years, in so many variations that I had intended to keep the pattern just for me (how selfish! lol). But we've had a few requests this year for some more larger patterns in our store... so I decided to play nice and share! I totally get it though - I much rather MAKE the larger bears to sell, but BUY the smaller bears for my own collection.

Big bears are so much fun. I feel like you can do SO much more with them too... as you'll see by my rather extensive list of example bears in this pattern....

With this guy, it was as simple as finding three contrasting mohair fabrics and cutting the limbs from one, the head/belly from another, the top of the body and the ears from yet another! (and adding lots of eye-shading!)

The pattern has such long limbs and body parts that it also works BEAUTIFULLY when rainbow-dyeing. You can get some really lovely variating tones by blending the colours down the limbs.

This girl was kept very simple with just some stunning pink feathered fur, pink paw pads and contrasting blue eyes.

The pattern is large enough to buy baby-clothes to dress the finished bear in as well! This baby-girl is wearing a size OOOO (newborn) jacket and a sweet little white ruffle nappy cover.

This one was a very unusual idea - we took a super long pile mongolian lambswool fur for the body and limbs and matched it up with a super short crew-cut mohair for the head and paw pads! Blue eyes tied the colours together and made for a very distinctive one of a kind bear.

The beauty of this patter is that it will work with both long and short pile fabrics. There's enough width in the pieces to still look in proportion when using a short-pile fabric, but enough length in the limbs that the shape isn't completely lost under longpile furs.

This was one of my favourites - just a classic bear in a luxury animal print faux fur.

For this guy we kept the cheeks fluffy and hand painted paw pads details on his feet.

Another one of our rainbow-dyed bears. To get this effect you need to cut the pattern pieces from the mohair first - then lay them out on the dyeing table and paint the colours where you want them to go. If you're careful and match up the colours from piece to piece you'll end up with a bear that just looks like she was born like this!

Tia is another of my favourite versions of this pattern. For this girl we just made some slight adjustments to the face (cut the side-head piece and gusset piece off at the muzzle and cut those bits from a plain white fur to contrast with the spotty fur).

Another feathered fur bear, this time with big handpainted paw pad detail.

And last but definitely not least - the full spotted bears. No face inserts or fully cheeks, just a classic bear with a trimmed face and a splash of gold on his nose and paws. You really can do ANYTHING with this pattern! I'm so looking forward to seeing what you guys come up with now!