Sew bear with me and a popoki pause

Somedays it is really hard for me to believe that I used to really love sewing. Today is one of those days. The knitting is all but done (a couple of ears to complete) on both the mama and baby bears but now I've all the fiddly sewing bits to do. Here's the baby bear with all strings attached, lots of seams to sew and no stuffing to speak of.


The baby bear is actually the small tweed bear in jacket from Debbie Bliss's Teddy Bears with a few adjustments.

First, I reversed the shaping of the 2nd leg rather than have two alike and a resulting strange seam.

Next I wasn't really crazy about the proportions of the body and the arms.

I decided that are arms needed a bit more shaping so I started them with garter "pads" that will match the garter soles I did for the feet.

I ended up knitting the body in one piece (neck to neck) with shaping in the hip/crotch area. I considered giving the bear a bit of "back" with short row shaping but lost interest somewhere along the line.

I also didn't like the whole idea of making the head by making extra arms (read rectangles) and doing all sculpting/shaping with the sewing up.

My first experiment was a stocking stitch version of the bear head found in Chris Rankin's Gift Knits but the resulting head was a bit oversized even for the larger body. I considered doing a garter version (which I've done before to good result) but instead opted to follow the instructions for the Bear in Nightshirt with Hat (Bliss Teddy Bears). Here's a side view of the somewhat stitched head.


The mama sized bear is sitting in a plastic bag also awaiting sewing and stuffing. Sewing and stuffing are not very walkabout activities but they do want doing and I've given myself a deadline so I'm sucking it up, sewing and shopping for more stuffing.

In a popoki moment, I've been carting the triangle solution around in the bottom of my bag for the last few weeks. The stitches have escaped the needle a few times so I may be doing a bit of back tracking before moving forward and the whole attach live stitches to the edging as you go may also not be very walkabout, here's my current solution to the mirror the shark's tooth and wave edging.