If you have visited my website, or looked through my Facebook pages, or even my Twitter Feed, you might notice that I never really make much commentary about my bears. I have a brief outline of what I do and my ideas in fairly broad terms but I don't really go to much detail about techniques. I don't show work in progress often, I am too untidy and it just looks a mess. I have always left it to others to comment on the merits or otherwise of my work. If I have ever mentioned such things it is more likely to be here on my blog which I seem to have neglected lately.
However, I did something recently which I am going to mention because I am proud of having found the patience to tackle it.
I made a new bear, I had given him an inset snout in a lighter colour to create a contrast on this particular pattern I had made changes to give him a longer snout and I wanted to soften the division between the colours.
The usual way to achieve this softening is to use ink and airbrush to blend and shade. I have never got on with airbrushing, I had a nasty experience with a whole bottle of lightfast waterproof ink and my carpet many years ago and vowed never to go near an airbrush again.
Anyway my solution was to harvest individual tufts of hair from each colour cloth and replant them across the bridge of the snout so the transition between the colours was slower. Its something I have done before to restore lost tufts on an old bear but to undertake the grafting on a new bear and be able to do the work economically is probably rather rash. I spent the best part of a day underneath my magnifying lamp and I am pleased with the result but as I finished I wondered if anybody would notice so I decided that, just for once, I would blow my own trumpet and say that this was very fiddly indeed, I am proud of the result but no, I probably wont do it again. To give you an idea of the scale, the bear, Greville, is about 10 inches tall.
Greville is already sold, other bears become available on my website at
