The following is an account of an artist’s first experience at creating an original bear. I was that artist, and I went on to create other interesting bears, including a two-faced Teddy Roosebear that had a reversible head that swiveled from a whimsical bear face to the likeness of Teddy Roosevelt, who is associated with the origin of the teddy bear. My account is meant to recapture the intensity of the creative force, which, in that almost-24-hour span in 1987, had virtual control of my life.

Night of the Bear

by Pam North

It was different this time. Once before she had tried it, using a purchased commercial pattern and some inexpensive fabric. The project had turned out successfully, as was expected, and she could say that she had made a teddy bear.
This round had been unplanned, and so was fraught with questions and unknowns. This project had simply arisen unexpectedly out of nowhere, forming from an unforeseen seed that somehow had planted itself and was growing inexorably.
It had started earlier that day, after her morning coffee. A whimsical animal was lurking in her mind, demanding to take form and substance. She wanted to create an endearing sculptured caricature of a bear, difficult to achieve in furry fabric alone, so she began to consider bringing an additional material into the scheme of things – polyform clay. A quick search of her craft supplies cabinet had yielded a box of polyform clay, which she had begun fiddling with immediately. Her fingers began smoothing the clay over a basic wooden egg-shaped form that eventually would be jointed into a soft-sculptured body. The vision of the bear’s appearance and personality seemed to flow from her mind to her fingers, coaxing them to provide form to her coalescing idea. She fussed and labored over every detail as she formed the facial contours, and she incorporated blue glass eyes into the face for a lifelike spark.
Hours went by, and as they passed the funny bear face emerged from concept to reality, as did an afterthought of four paw pads with claws. All were carefully molded and detailed, and more hours were invested in painstakingly applying acrylic paint accents of highlight and shade. The face had developed a quirky, winsome personality. The intense efforts had fueled her creative sparks into a collective fiery force that would not be denied. The completed pieces were begging for the catalyst of a body.
Eyeing the size of the head and paw pads, she idly began drawing pattern shapes for an original bear that had not existed before, but one that had been gnawing at her mind. The pencil lines formed pudgy, ursine shapes as she sketched, at first more tentatively, then more confidently and deliberately. Once completed, the pattern beckoned with surprisingly forceful pull. Would it work? The only way to know would be to turn the the drawn pattern into fabric pieces to be stitched together.
As her vision had begun to gel, her need to make it a reality had become a force of its own. A cache of fabrics, long stored away for some future undetermined but important project, suddenly saw daylight as the cabinet drawer was opened and its contents were revealed and examined. An intact yardage of precious and expensive mohair, shaggy and variegated in natural tones, beckoned and was seized upon. The paper pattern pieces were cut out and pinned on the reverse side of the fur, with the direction of the pile carefully observed and considered. Her special Fiskar scissors, the ones used only when the sharpest cutting was of importance, were selected and implemented. Cutting from the fabric’s woven side, and engaging the sharp scissor tips carefully so as to cut only the fabric backing and not the long pile, she soon rendered the mohair pattern shapes separate and ready to be sewn together. Would the pieces merge together well to create the desired shape? Would the assembled shapes create the proper-sized body for the already-created head in which she had invested so much creative labor?
It was very late at night; hours had sped by as she had immersed herself in her intense creative process. She headed toward her sewing machine, and soon had spent most of the remaining nighttime hours sewing together all the separate fabric parts; then, with the incorporation of wooden disc joints, joining body and limbs into one poseable unit. Now the completed body lay limp before her, presenting the final question – would it work successfully with the clay pieces? As she picked up the body, she held her breath momentarily as she sought to confirm the success of the marriage of all her efforts. Inserting the head into the neck aperture, she completed the joint attachment, and it seemed that the body and head would work well together. She took a few extra minutes to glue several fur bits strategically onto areas of the clay head so its character would blend more pleasingly with the mohair body, and she also glued the clay pads onto the bottom surfaces of the paws. All the components were together, but until the body was stuffed into its final shape, however, the ultimate symmetry wasn’t assured. The suspense was killing her.
Again the the storage cabinet was searched, but this time to no avail. The one missing element to the completion of her fantasy bear was stuffing. Normally a fat bag or two of white fluff was stored on the cabinet shelf, but this time was an exception, and there was no filler to round the bear’s body into its final form.
Since the morning sun was still an hour or so from banishing the night’s darkness, purchasing the needed stuffing was impossible to accomplish immediately. The intensity that had built from the many preceding hours of concentration and effort was at a fever pitch. She had to bring her bear to its final stage of completion and ultimate form – now!
It is said that necessity often fosters invention, and thus it happened that the bear received its final shape from being filled with the contents of a convenient large box of uncooked rice, which worked surprisingly well in firmly filling out the contours of the body. The quirky bear holds its secret behind its smile as it sits innocently in its rustic wooden chair, and no onlooker would guess what really lies inside its furry body. The bear’s creator also knows that if someday she did not know where her next meal was coming from, she could eat him.