What I Did on My Summer Vacation

The newest country singer

“Elaine” has been here for about four weeks now, and it’s getting hard to remember life without her. Garth and I love this little one and would like to start the adoption process very soon to make her our daughter!

We have had lots of fun together, going to the zoo, taking a vacation to the Rocky Mountains, riding horseback, swimming, playing chicken foot and Uno, tossing a frisbee, watching a movie, tickling, dancing to newly discovered country music, and the list goes on. Some of the most special times are when we read the Bible together at night, chop vegetables together, or share a kiss and a cuddle.

Please visit our family blog, the Hoffmann Clan, to see and hear more, and join us on our journey to be Mama and Papa to Elaine.

She’s Coming in Two Weeks!

There has been no bear-making here in the New Avenue Crew studio because she’s coming in two weeks! Our summer visitor from Ukraine (”Elaine”) will arrive so very soon, and we don’t feel ready. What I find oddly comforting is that many people who have children have told me, “You never feel ready.” My other comfort is that God will allow us to be as ready as He wants us to be, and I know He wants us to trust Him for every part of this summer.

We find ourselves wishing we had more money to fix up our place so it’s more homey, but maybe it takes time to do so. Please tell me that’s so, that your home wasn’t completely homey right off the bat!

We’re very much hoping to have enough money to make Elaine’s summer special, to take her to some beautiful places, to teach her to make a bear, to travel with her to Garth’s brother’s wedding and to meet our parents, but we know that God will provide.

We’re hoping we will be good host parents because, well, we’ve never been parents before. But we love kids. And this one is 13 and speaks Russian. Did I tell you I love a challenge? Oh, and I also love learning languages. I’m excited that I’ll have my very own Russian tutor.

If you want to read a little more about this new adventure of ours, please visit our family blog, the Hoffmann Clan. I hope to update it weekly throughout the summer.

If you would like to help, we would love to have you pray for us, to leave us comments, and to follow along as Elaine experiences America. You can also e-mail me at hoffhouse at hotmail dot com. And if you would like to donate to Elaine’s summer, please e-mail me.

We’re hanging on for a wild ride…won’t you join us?

Have Stuffing Stick, Will Stuff

Of course, one also needs a sewn bear part that’s had its seams combed and has been turned right side out. And stuffing, lots of stuffing.

From my basement travels, I’ve managed to locate a bear (well, a very flat one) who is mostly sewn and has been waiting patiently for a few years (well, many years) to be stuffed and finished. The mohair is a pretty peachy-pinky color, very subtle, which makes me think this will be a girly bear. Now that I’ve decided it’ll be a girl, I’m sure it will be a fight to the finish to have her end up that way. Typically, I don’t know until the bear is finished and looking back at me whether it’s a boy or a girl. I’ve heard other bear makers say the same thing, I’m relieved to say. Trust me, it’s not as easy as it sounds! I’ve put a bow around a bear’s neck, thinking it was a boy, only to be pondering about it later, wondering whether I should try that bow on his head…and voila! Yep, she was a girl bear the whole time.

But back to stuffing. Yes, I must confess that I, Debora Hoffmann, picked up the aforementioned stuffing stick and the head of the rescued flat bear on Monday evening and actually inserted stuffing into the head. Wow! Happy dance!

I would love to tell you, dear reader, that I finished stuffing the bear’s head and moved on to another task on this poor bear, but sadly, that is not the case. I had to retire for the evening. But I long to get back to it, to finish up the bear’s head. One of the next tasks will be to sew the footpads onto the feet, and I am not looking forward to it. I need some sort of magnification for my sewing machine–or I need a new pair of eyes. I am finding that not seeing very well makes for more mistakes (I have an art background, not a sewing background), and I detest ripping out the great, tight seams that my machine sews…because, for one, I have to see up close to do it! Sigh.

Back to stuffing again. There are probably as many ways to work with stuffing as there are bear makers. I tend to pull mine into ropes and then push it in with my stuffing stick, which is shaped like a T (see the picture above). I remember way back when I was first making bears that I made balls of stuffing, but I like the ropes better, though it takes time to make them. The right stuffing can give such a nice, round shape to a bear’s head or body or foot, but it can’t tame a bad hair day. Though I will not be taking a picture that shows this, this formerly flat bear head, which had been waiting patiently in its bag with its other parts, has, um, a bit of a cowlick in a couple of places. Talk about bed head. But I think a little judicious misting and smoothing here and there will help the ol’ girl. Let’s just not mention it to her, shall we?

Back from the Basement

My dear, sweeet husband hunted around in the basement and brought up my teddy bear idea notebooks. I’ve already torn out some things I won’t be needing, started doodling new bears on pieces of scrap paper, and have added quite a few new names to my huge list of teddy bear names. Looking at that list just gets the creative juices flowing!

I remember way, way back to when the list of names started: my sister Jennifer and I wrote down every teddy bear name we could think of so we could send a good long list to Corla Cubillas of the Dancing Needle (whose creations we just loved!). We had met her at a teddy bear show, and she said she was running out of names for her bears.

Jen and I took our inspiration from just about everything: street names, cities, trees, food, flowers… We had a lot of fun keeping a keen eye out whenever we were driving around town or watching TV. We compiled quite a long list and sent it off to Corla, but I kept it going and still add to it when inspiration strikes. There were over a thousand names in 2000, many years after our initial list; I wonder how many there are now! Does anyone else love names like I do?

Bears on the Brain

Lately I have been finding that I have bears on the brain. I’ve heard it described as an addiction, as a fever, as being bitten by the bear bug, but I don’t think it’s that bad. Yet. My bear brain is a bit different from others’ in that I want to create teddy bears instead of collect them (though there are some gorgeous artist bears out there who would really love to come home and live with me someday, I just know it!).

I want to go down to the basement and open the big plastic bins of fur and lay them out on the carpet, run my hands through them, segment them into colors and fur lengths, take a photo of some of them in lovely combinations of color… Maybe it’s fur fever.

I’ve been looking at some of the teddy bear magazines I managed to hang onto during our weeding-out-and-throwing-away-anything-that-might-weigh-a-lot phase when we were moving from Seattle to Colorado. They inspire me with their pages of bears of the antique, traditional, character, anime, tiny, large, fluffy, and barely-covered-in-fur ilk. I have design ideas running around in my brain: a bigger bear with a nice plumpness to his body and a broad face with full cheeks, a little miss in pink with gingham check frills and kind eyes… Maybe it’s design derangement.

I’ve been wanting to dive in and write all about bears, home, cooking, creating–in short, I want to tell you, dear reader, all that goes on in the Crew studio… Maybe it’s writing weakness.

I am hampered still by the time factor: there seems to be no time in my days right now to make bears. I’m hoping it’ll happen when I can organize a space for my supplies. I’m hoping it’ll happen when my husband’s job calms down a bit. I’m hoping it’ll happen when I get more organized in my life outside my full-time job, including laundry, cooking, cleaning, the usual. My ideas need to come out in some way, and hopefully it’ll be soon… Maybe I’m suffering from creative consumption.

Fueling the fire has been my by-now-frequent trips to Teddy Talk. I dropped out of the TT world for a while because I wasn’t making bears and was needing to focus on other things; life has a way of intervening. And that’s not to say that life intervening was bad, not at all! But I’m hopeful that I can get back to art, to creativity. We’ll see.

So I thought I would share a bear with you. This is Phineas, one of my very early bears (circa 1998). He is named after P.T. Barnum, hence the circus theme. Some bits of trivia: my husband painted his stand (it’s a terra cotta flower pot!). I plucked each piece of blue mohair out of Phineas’s face so the yellow fabric backing would show. Oh, and he has a tail!

And thank you for listening to my fevered ramblings!

Time to Get Bloggin’!

It is high time I posted something on this blog. I started it back in late 2006 to become familiar with WordPress because my work was using it as a content management system for a Web site we were building. Too bad I don’t know much about it; I’m more familiar with Blogger. But I’m ready to learn!

Teddy bears have been on my mind lately. I haven’t worked on them in nearly a year. Sometimes life just gets so full of other things that there isn’t much time for the fur and fluff. And sometimes the fur and fluff get carted down to the basement where they aren’t very accessible. Too true, dear reader! My usual work station, if you can call it that, is the dining room table. See, I’m not so very different from you! I’m sure you do much more than eat at your dining room table.

Anyway, teddy bears on the brain… I am very hopeful that I can get an area for storing my supplies that will allow them to be much more handy, even if I do still continue to do most of the work at the dining room table. It would be great if everything were on the same floor of the house. And, I am very hopeful that I’ll be able to snatch some time for bears this summer. A summer vacation, of sorts. Which leads me to why I think I’ll be able to have time here and there…

Lord willing, my husband Garth and I will be hosting a girl from Ukraine in our home this summer. We are so excited! I’m thinking I might even be able to teach her to make her own teddy bear (among many other things, of course). If you would like to know a little more about our new adventure, please visit my family blog: The Hoffmann Clan.

Thank you for visiting! I plan to update this blog a lot more…when I have time…oh, goodness!

New Avenue Crew Joins the Blogosphere

New Avenue Crew wanted another place to hang out on the Web, so I decided to start a new blog!

This Crew member is Juniper. I designed and made him back in 2002, and he lives in Japan with my friend Hiromi. The garden he is enjoying is from when my husband and I lived in the Seattle area. I like the photo because it reminds me of our time there…so I used it as the header photo on this blog!

Enjoy the block party of bears at my Web site:
New Avenue Crew