A bear named Daisy

Customers and friends often ask me about how I think of designs for bears, how long they take to make, do I dress bears ? And, one of the questions which comes up is whether, or not, I make female bears.   I suppose the truthful answer is that I am not entirely sure how a bear appears female when it is finished, so I have rarely actually set out with the intention of a bear being female.  I made a set for a charity auction many ( many ) years ago which was called mother and cubs.  The cubs were smaller and more cubby in proportion, but the parent bear could have just as well been father from its appearance, since it was a "grizzly" type bear with no means of indicating gender by clothing.

I made a little tableau once,  I purchased doll house scale accessories and built a kitchen in a cave.  I had a table covered in food of all kinds, a cooking range and just about everything a cave kitchen would need, and to take charge of this kitchen I made the single smallest bear I have ever attempted, probably only about 4 inches tall, possibly even smaller ( no I am not making another one, I don't even have the pattern any more ).    The little bear was unclothed, I hadn't considered its gender but almost everybody who saw the piece assumed it was a mummy bear preparing food for the family, so the conclusion was reached due to their gender role perception, not any intent on my part.  The original owner sold it on and I have no idea if it still exists, I have no photos but if anybody out there knows the whereabouts of "bear in kitchen" I would like to know if only to have a photograph.    Anyway the point being that I didn't consciously make a female because I wouldn't really know how.

Sometimes a bear becomes female simply because I have been inspired by a name, I once named a bear Rosa, it was red ( rose ) and white in a panda design and I had been listening to recordings of Rosa Ponselle ( if you don't know who she was take a moment to google her name, feel ashamed for not knowing and listen to the lady who some regard as the stand out great Soprano of all time ) .

Many people dress bears quite elaborately and thus many become female because of their attire, I have never really dressed bears beyond a waistcoat, so even then gender is not necessarily obvious.

However recently I was following on Facebook the development of a litter of Newfoundland dog puppies, 2 boys and a girl.  One of them was a particularly fluffy, chunky adorable white and black one, one day a picture was captioned with the name chosen for her,  "Daisy" it just seemed perfect and if I had been lucky enough to be able to adopt her I would have happily called her Daisy.  And that's how I ended up naming a bear Daisy, I have never done it before but I set out to make that bear look as cute and fluffy as Daisy.  I think I achieved lady bear just by softness and perhaps leaving her face fuzzier than usual, and by chance I found a piece of vintage cloth in my mum's childhood supply of doll making materials.    I did start to make Daisy a little dress from the fabric which had blue daisies on it, but it was heading more towards lampshade so I abandoned that in favour of a generous and flamboyant bow. 

Her pictures received many kind compliments on Facebook, some people remarking that they like my girl bears, so I have resolved to make some more, having said that I am still not sure how, but watch out because I think I may have to make a dress for the next one.  Daisy is the smallest size pattern I use at the moment and she stands at just under 8 inches tall.

Incidentally and entirely a co-incidence, Daisy and her namesake puppy both went to their new owners on the same day.

Daisy has a new home already but detail of availability and more information can be found on my website www.hugoshouse.com

Attention to detail

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

www.hugoshouse.com

Shrinking bears again

This is becoming a regular theme.  This time I decided it was time that the six-joint standing bear should be treated to a smaller cousin.  And, as has been the case before, the shrinking process didn't go quite as far as I intended but I managed just over 9 inches; I will also try very hard to make sure that it doesn't grow with pattern revisions.

I thought that such a small bear deserved a very big name so the first one was called Hercules.

 

 

The small size has meant that I have had to revise a lot of the joint components and in particular a smaller nut and bolt set for jointing. I know that doesn't sound like much but after 23 years of the same it is a big change in my little world.  It was especially fiddly fitting it inside the neck section and I am still refining that.

 

 

I have had to use glass eyes over  my preferred vintage boot buttons too,  there simply aren't any that small.

 

 

Purely to give an idea of scale....

 

A bear has to eat, the dogs won't miss one biscuit

 

 

Hercules soon acquired a "brother" but in a rusty shade. It seemed quite an appropriate shade for Autumn so he decided to be photographed with some of the pretty leaves from the Acer in my front garden, I know, everybody else has pumpkins and I just wanted to be different.

 

 

This one is Wotan, another large name for a small bear, and I am pleased to report that, despite a few minor pattern adjustments he didn't come out any taller.

 

More information about my bears, including any available, can be found on my website at

 

www.hugoshouse.com

 

If you would like earliest information about new bears as they become available please e.mail me at

Gregory@hugoshouse.com

and ask to be added to my mailing list.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Buttons and Bows

I seem to be in classic bear mode at the moment, my work schedule goes along with what I enjoy most and I have been enjoying smaller vintage bears.

Recently though I did make one larger one and as I had a pattern for a waistcoat in the correct size, I also made one of those for him.   The customer who bought him also asked for a bow tie, so I duly made one and was rather pleased with the effect.  However that gave me another little problem of detail, having seen how smart the larger one looked I felt that they looked a little under dressed with a waistcoat but no tie.

So the latest one, Mortimer, now also has a bow tie, made from the cotton fabric I used for the back of his waistcoat.

 To make these things for an 11 inch bear is at about the limit of smallness with which my fingers will co-operate.  The waistcoat is a common enough accessory for a bear, but I think just about as much clothing as they need or are likely to get from me.

I finally worked out the sequence to sew the parts together to achieve a lined garment and I punish myself by insisting that they have functioning button holes, further more I like hand worked buttonholes.  All a bit of an obsession with detail and I am not really sure if anybody notices but essential for my own satisfaction.

Many, many years ago in my early naive days I entered a competition in a category for "dressed bears" and decided to go for a waistcoat.  At that stage I had very little exposure to the bear artist world and to my mind that seemed plenty for a bear to wear.  So I duly wrestled making a new bear pattern, fought with a piece of vintage hat velvet which frayed as soon as you looked at it, I lined it with silk and then tackled the buttons.  I wanted something special and spent a small fortune on vintage crystal dancing shoe buttons from a collector of vintage buttons and to finish the job also managed to hand sew almost neat little buttonholes. It all took significantly longer than making the bear and I placed it among the forest of fully costumed bears on the competition table.  Of course it didn't get a place but I was upset to be virtually told off by a bear world doyen for having the cheek to enter a dressed category with a bear just wearing a waistcoat.  To add to my displeasure I had made it as a gift for the promoter who invited me to my first US show, he looked at it with disdain and said something like "Oh, is that the one you made for me.... "  I didn't remain friends with him anyway after he informed me that he preferred his friends to be more charismatic.  

I do get bogged down with detail sometimes, Mortimer's waistcoat took me a whole day to make, I experimented with different threads to make the buttonholes until I ended up ordering silk twist which seemed to scale nicely, it frays in my rough fingers and each buttonhole took ages to sew working under a magnifier.  But I do it nowadays for my own satisfaction, it is nowhere near perfect but I am satisfied I have done my best and I continue my journey aiming to improve each time.  I am in danger of wanting to make a fully correct scaled bow tie next so that I don't have to resort to the press stud to secure it.

I often dream about making more fully costumed bears, but as it takes me the best part of a week to make a bear nowadays I can't see that happening anytime soon.

   

Classic Bears - Subtle evolution

This is going to be a bit of a ramble, I haven't written anything here for a while, I have probably hinted that the last year has been one of recovery and I am pleased to report that it has been going very well.  However, although other aspects have improved, I have been avoiding larger bears for some time due to a developing shoulder problem, this morning I had fluid drawn out of it and a cortisone injection to help, it doesn't seem to be working any better so smallish bears are on the menu for the forseeable future !

I suppose it is not really a surprise that I have a long standing affection for the very traditional style of bear.  Quite specifically the early German style, and I am sure that is quite obvious from many of the bears I have made over the years.  I am intrigued by the subtlety of their expressions, although not necessarily obviously cute, their long snouted faces are often kind with a slightly elusive smile; their matt finish boot button eyes are irregular and have a soft lustre which I prefer to the harsher twinkle of glass.  But the face is nothing if it is not balanced by nicely shaped shoulders, paws, arms etc any of which jar with me if they are not just so according to my own ideal.  And by that I am not saying that there is a right or wrong, but I have my own ideal which I suppose is a sort of composite inspiration from any number of antique bears I have seen over the years.

I regularly revisit the patterns I use sometimes just to alter the overall size but often to improve the shapes as I see them.  I  conversation I had with a customer at the recent Hugglets show prompted me to think about what I look for in a bear, and thus what I aspire to create myself.

My semi retirement has allowed me more time on each bear to fiddle and fuss over the final result and remake patterns between bears, it does sometimes mean I spend a little too long but I hope it shows in the result. It also affords me the luxury of only making bears for which I am in the mood, and I think that too focus my attention on the details better.

Now I have always been reluctant to say exactly what it is that each little pattern change is supposed to achieve, and indeed only I really know whether it was successful.  You would think that after 23 years I would have run out of steam but the intriguing aspect to me of making the simplest traditional bear come to life is an ongoing process, each is different and there are endless ways to give each a slightly different posture and expression.

I think of certain fundamental things as the basic vocabularly. I am, for example, especially obsessed by the shape of the arms, it is one of the things which jars most if I feel it has not been realised appropriately, and no I haven't always got it quite right myself, which only spurs me on to make little adjustments.  Within that "vocabularly" of basics there is plenty of scope to make an almost endless procession of bears and for each to have his or her own personality.

The latest revision was to create a little bear just over 9 inches tall, the reason being to use 3 pairs of tiny genuine vintage boot buttons and I needed a bear small enough for them to look correct in scale.  Mission accomplished but now I have to track down more of the tiny boot buttons, so the next bears will be a little larger but will of course incorporate all the improvements I made to my pattern shapes.  And I will be spending time on ebay tracking down the little buttons lurking in the endless listings of job lots of old buttons!