A new year, a new challenge

Christmas has been and gone, the decorations have been put away and the house would be looking a little sad if it wasn’t for the several inches of snow that we had last night.  Being the UK, this means that everything has ground to a halt, no post, no papers, few trains and the road has been turned into an ice rink.

I came across the Creative Every Day, which encourages people to be more creative and blog about it – given my total lack of bloggery recently, it seemed like a good idea.  While it isn’t documented here, I do actually sew, embroider or do more sewing most nights, so I am hoping that this will give me the push needed to reveal more.

For Christmas I gave several bears as gifts, this bear is a variation on my raspberry coloured bear I had made earlier, but this time I made him with an open mouth.  It was my first try on making an open mouth bear because it can be tricky as some bears end up looking like the joker, demented or just downright scary.   Thankfully I managed to achieve the look I wanted – smiley and friendly.

Ohai DaveBear!  What are you up to?

He is made out of a pale honey coloured mohair which had blue tips – it was a much brighter blue than the photo and looked a little odd, so using my new airbrushing kit I knocked back the colour with some grey.  His nose is needlefelted, as is the definition around his mouth.  You can’t see it, but I also managed to needlefelt up to make a roof of his mouth too.  This was the first time I had done needlefelting on a bear and it was so much fun.  As much as I love embroidery there is a certain element of suspense when you are embroidering a nose because you never know whether it will be even, so needlefelting is easy and effective (although watch your fingers – those needles really hurt!).

His eyes are airbrushed to give some definition and he has been needlesculpted with a little bit of scissor sculpting.

Here is DaveBear under the Christmas tree.  I was quite sad to see him go because he looked so cheerful, but he is going to a good home where I am sure that he’ll get up to a lot of mischief!

More projects to come…

Ohai DaveBear!, originally uploaded by Nicola’sNeedles.