Moon Bear is a special pattern from Monica Spicer. I liked the look of her bear so bought the pattern from her Etsy.com shop "Mon's Treasures". The shop has the most amazing patterns. However I did not get the eyelids to work out for me. Kind of why I bought the pattern. He still turned out well and the young lady who got him is happy and that matters most : )


Moon Bear

I love the tummy insert and how the muzzle has a two tone. Not something I do much but will be great for the lion and fox in my works.

I am working on a pattern to sell on Etsy.com. I designed this puppy a while ago for O.R.V.A.L . They are an animal league that works with rescue and rehabilitation of cats and dogs in Louisianna. I made a few puppies and kitties for them. I had hoped to hear about how they did with the sale of these but I know organizing fund raisers is never easy, and things fall through the cracks as a lot of people that work with them volunteer. I swear volunteers help make the world go around!



Sketch to pattern

Close up of picture

Another fabulous weekend out camping. We spent a night at the Guadalupe River State Park. It is absolutely gorgeous there even though the river is low. Walking along the riverbank in the shade of the biggest swamp cypress I have ever seen (bar San Antonio's river walk) was cool and so awesome. The roots of these trees are huge and at first I thought they were a pile of driftwood, not roots. I was sad to see someone had carved their initials into the biggest of the trees. We also got a chance to see buzzards sunning themselves on the tree tops. I have never seen so many in one spot. We counted 12 !

Of course the next day was spent at Schlitterbahn Waterpark in New Braunfels. Just for E. The 90 minute wait to do the MasterBlaster ride was worth it. I am sure there are people who were in the line behind us who's ears are still ringing from our screams : )

The next night was spent camping at Bastrop State Park in Austin. It is still very obvious a huge fire went through there a couple of years ago. It is not our first time to stop there and we can see the difference in the park. All the new young trees growing out of the ashes. We were also lucky that though it was August, we did not melt sitting outside as the weather was fabulous. It is dry so no mosquitos either which is a double bonus.

I have been working on a bear with a tummy and nose insert that are differently colored to his body. I am also working on trapunto paws. The puffy ones : )

Trapunto paws on my sunshine dragon

 

It is hard to design a bear when I keep looking at my new Charlie Bear called Dreamer. The Charlie Bears are hard to get here (very limited numbers) but so worth the effort and cost. Have a look at their website...
http://www.charliebears.com/

I will post pictures of my new bear later as he is planned as a gift and I do not want to ruin the surprise. I am also planning some soft toys along my weenie steakboy line. Just trying to think of a few I would like to attempt. I have often made miniature dogs out of fleece and felt but I think I would like to make a range of dogs and maybe cats out of fleece but bigger and maybe more anime influenced.

I also am on facebook now. That is new and daunting as I never really know what to do. I want to get pictures out of my work and get feedback from people. I am hoping it will give me a direction to focus my bear design on.

Marie Mouse is finally finished. Her shoes took a long time- small, delicate and fiddly. The soles are leather and the top is made out of wool felt. Her fan has been made from cotton lace and accented with gold glitter glue. Both have small pearls added. The fan and the shoes are removable.

The shoes are made from wool felt uppers and leather soles.

 

The fan is cotton lace that has been gathered and decorated with gold glitter glue.

Marie mouse detail

Her back showing the long curly hair and bow with pheasant feathers. You can just make out the pleats at the back of the dress.

 

Marie Mouse. The front of the dress.

 

She stands a whole 8 inches tall and is fully jointed. Her face has been needle felted and she has fishing gut whiskers. The glass eyes are accentuated with leather lids and eye lashes. The bodice piece is an earring from Charming Charlie's. I used it to decide on the color of her dress and ribbon. Her feet and hands were sculpted from Sculpey ( no molds used)  and the wire inside the Sculpey part has a wire that runs up to the joint. The ends are also glues in for good measure. She has copic coloring to the ears and cheeks. I think she may be missing a "patch" like they would have historically had on their cheek : )

 

 

 

 

 

THE PHOTOGRAPHING CHALLENGE

A big challenge for anyone photographing a craft is getting it right. Creating that warm fuzzy feeling. I struggle with this almost as much as costing out a bear. A good camera is great, but only if you know how to use it!

I have had the same camera for years and only recently, to my great embarrassment, I actually found out what some of the buttons on it do! I always just take a picture with the AUTO setting on. I do use the small flower logo so that I can focus in closer. I like the point and shoot approach. The Macro setting (the flower logo) option offers me my close up and this has always seemed to work just fine. Lately I have noticed a blue  or green-yellow sheen on my pictures. The whole color is off. Especially if there is white on the bear.

This should be a black and white bear on a white background.

 

I alo always use a white background so that when you see the store in Etsy it is all the same and looks uniform. However since I have changed the bulbs in the lighting I use, it seems to have changed the whole look I am getting. I am now using compact fluorescents and the reading of color on my camera has been changed. Did you know you can accommodate that different lightbulb on a camera? It is called white balance. The button looks like a sun. It helps your camera adjust to the light you are photographing in, so that white appears to be white and not slightly yellow or green or blue.

 

Of course you can correct white balance by just take pictures, loading them onto the computer and adjusting them with software like Picasa or Photoshop. That is what I do now : ) But I want to make sure that when I photograph my plushies that I end up with a good image that needs little work to adjust. I feel like I am cheating if I have to adjust anything other than a crop to fit in a nice image. The white balance button allows you to choose between daylight ( a sun logo), cloudy conditions (a cloud logo), fluorescent (looks like a long bar with light rays coming off of it), flash (the lightning bolt) and tungsten (a normal light bulb with rays). This helps the camera adjust to the light so that white will look like white again.

 

Totally overexposed and all you can make out is the black. Dramatic but not good.

 

Been adjusted using software but still not right. Gone from green to pinkish.

 

This little panda has given me so many challenges to photograph. Have a look on my Etsy.com site and tell me if you think I am getting better. I know I need more work on my photographing, but my skill in is making and not photographing animals, so I learn as I go along. Each small success is one more feather in my cap. When I started making bears I never thought I still had so much to learn! I like to count each success no matter how small as some days that is what keeps me going when things do not work out how I like!

 



 

 

Wow! We are home from a six and a half weeks of world travel. E and I went to London to hug an aunt and see Harrods. We could not get to world famous Hamley's due to road closures as people were protesting the G8 summit. Still saw some awesome Steiff Bears and of course bought a Harrods bear : )

On to South Africa. Grandpa took us to Bakubung near Sun City. We got to see some awesome animals and what a fabulous experience. This is who joined us for lunch one day!

We sat up at an open air restaurant and he came right up and drank from the fish pond. I wonder what the fish thought?



 

After that we went to the coast and even though it was winter it was warm enough to swim. Durban was still warm and humid. Summer there can be super steamy!

 

Cape Town was next on our list. It is still one of the most beautiful places in the world and I ate far too much really superb food. Never mind all the good wine.

The drive around the coastal highway to Camps Bay.

 

 

Cape Town felt more like winter and the wind really scared us some nights as it blew so hard! Pity we had to see most of this in winter, as South Africa in summer is wonderful. But school holidays...

 

When we got back to Johannesburg, Grandpa felt that we needed to interact with some animals.

E feeding a giraffe. She wiped the drool off on my jeans after that. Yuk- giraffe drool is sticky

In the enclosure with the baby lions and a baby hyena. The hyena just wanted to chew on us and already those jaws are strong. The cubs liked E's pink trousers and kept swatting them.

 

Back home. Still feeling the jet lag but it is good to be home. Now back to work creating some new animals. Just not sure who should be first...