Welcome to my blog!

As the title says - welcome - and thank you for visiting my new blog! Apologies for the rather stark, all-white look; I haven't got around to decorating yet. I'm still trying to figure out what all the buttons do.

Let me try for some pictures:

Hooray!

The top picture is Rory - a bear I made a couple of years ago. The yellow bear is Clarissa, a more recent creation.

I am a bear-maker from the UK. I have been making them for the past... 4 years (I think), and for the last 3 years, I have been renting a unit at a local art & craft centre.

This blog is for inspiration, for sharing new projects which won't fit on my website, and for discussing the problems of filling and arranging a retail space, and generally trying to sell things I have made myself.

With three years under my belt, you would have thought I would have got the hang of it by now - but no, I still find it incredibly testing.

One of the very difficult things about running the unit is finding, or making, smaller cheaper things which people will buy on the spur of the moment. The bears take ages to make, and are made from beautiful, but very costly, mohair, so they're not things which people buy on a whim.

I have previously bought in manufactured things - commercial teddy bears for children - but that feels like cheating. Also, the art & craft centre obviously has lots of other units, filled with a wide variety of stuff (some hand-made, some not), and it's difficult trying to find something which someone else doesn't already do.

I have always meant to try making a rabbit though, and this month seemed quite a good opportunity - what with spring, and Easter and all that. I went for an unjointed rabbit with a cloth body, so he would be slightly less expensive to make. Here he is...

I made another one with the face cut out of the remainder of the mohair I used for Clarissa (above). It did not turn out quite so well - perhaps because the pile is longer, so I lost definition in the face.

I have not been deterred though: I am currently making a third rabbit - this time all-mohair. He will be a self-standing rabbit, and he will stand on the top shelf, wearing a sandwich board, and imparting important messages to customers.

I will post the results, when he's finished.