Lily in Progress

Hello!

I've been a busy girl since my last foray into teddy bear making. I have enough fabric to make four to six bears with a little bit of creativity and thriftiness, stuffing, weighting BBs, several gorgeous eyeballs of German origin, and I am currently awaiting a small hoard of various sized joints and bolts so that I might never again face the disappointment of receiving 50 cotter pin joints that are about half the size I actually need for this particular project.

All I need now... are the patterns.

I always like to go my own way so I decided pretty quickly that the only time I'm going to work from other people's patterns are when they are far above me and I have something to learn from them. This is good both from the point of view of my personal growth as an artist, and also from my personal growth as a mercurial purveyor of all things cute and cuddly (aka, I can sell the results if they are sufficiently felicitous.)

As I already tackled the one pattern I own, it was time to get creative. I had no muslin or other "test" fabric. The nearest fabric shop is quite a ways away, and I had no interest in dragging my toddler on the necessary bus and subway trip to get there... so I dug in the closet and found an old pair of my husband's holey bluejeans. I knew I kept those suckers for a reason...

 Meet Lily, my very first self-made pattern. My goals with Lily were threefold: create a bib of a contrasting color, design arms with "downward facing" palms, and give the legs that more realistic, vaguely anthropomorphic shape I like so much. I also wanted the limbs to be fairly thin in comparison with my first bear, which proved to be a success though quite challenging to turn.

I sized the head up by about 2 mm in every direction when I cut it out of my real fabric (ditto for the ears.) I am kind of regretting that decision and I am toying with the idea of setting the larger head aside for my second bear from this fabric.

I am making lily out of a semi-sparse lilac mohair with a bib of likewise semi-sparse white. Her nose and muzzle will be needle felted in white and blended with scraps of the lilac mohair. I hope to make her nose and muzzle more delicate than my first bear, which is why her nose is substantially smaller.

I am just finishing up the flat sewing. Wish me luck! I am just in love with the bibbed body and I intend to use it on at least one more bear in this batch. The bib was harder to do than I expected but so worth it in the end. It's so sweet in the real bear.

Wish us luck! (By us I mean both bearmaker and the bear.)