BAO A great success!

I woke at 7am this morning to find three of my five Bear Artist Online Summer Show bears had sold while I slept! How exciting!

After answering my emails, I dashed across to the BAO website to see how things were going and discovered the show was well underway and already a resounding success! By 3am BST, we had already received 18000 hits on the show site and sold 35 of the bears already! WOW!

Teatime update: At 6.30pm BST I can report the show has now sold 66 of its bears and there are still several hours left to go until the doors are closed! I can't quite resist checking my inbox every few minutes ... I hope I can stay awake until the witching hour to keep in touch with everyone, but I fear I may doze off in the armchair!

The show runs until midnight tonight, so there's still plenty of time to browse through the fabulous bears, I warn you though, be prepared, you may well fall in love!

And at long last I can stop the teasing and share my own show bears with you properly ... I hope you think they are worth the wait!

So, introducing Billy Buttons (bowtie), Domino (black and white), Dippitty (sleepy lids!), Dolly Daydreams (pink and white) and Whisper (standing) ... as you can tell, all bar Whisper are as the result of my recent 'clown thang'! I hope you enjoy them as much I enjoyed creating them!

They range in size from 15" to 23" and are all one-off pieces.

As I had so much fun with the clowns, I've recently thrown down the gauntlet for a clown challenge on the Teddy Talk forum. It should be fun to see how many clown variations we bear designers can develop ... I'll keep you posted!