Bear Beginnings, Auntie Bears

Bear Beginnings

I have been hunting out old 'Auntie Bears' photographs from the 1990's... this photo was snapped at 'The Big Bear Show' in the Business and Design Centre, Islington, London in 1998...

Back in my early bearmaking days, teddy bear photographs were taken on an old SLR 35mm film camera and developed at the local printers. Sharing new work was a much longer-winded process than it is today...digital cameras and mobile phones have made the process of distributing photographs so much faster. However, it has also made it even more important to remember to document my bears because digital pictures are so easily lost and forgotten.

For the past twenty years, I have always made an annual photobook of my designs. I keep the books lined up neatly on my workroom shelf and enjoy referring back to them regularly when I am designing new bears. It is a lovely document of how my teddy bears evolved over the years and one day, I hope my grandchildren will enjoy these portfolio books and take a sense of pride in their Nana's 'work'. 

It occurred to me recently, that my earliest designs weren't ever made into a photo album and neither was the 'Auntie Bears' story...

The 90's was a very special time for hand crafted teddy bears in the United Kingdom, re-igniting a nostalgic passion for teddy bears in collectors who had loved them as children and lighting a flame of creativity in many aspiring bearmakers. Prior to the age of the internet, teddy bears became established as an art form in the UK in the early 1990's, designed and created with dedication and love by bear artists in their own homes, then sold through shops and at specialist teddy bear fairs across the country. 

It was an exciting time to become a new bearmaker. There were so many creative challenges... learning to run one's own business effectively, fulfilling the desire to produce quality teddy bears to share with collectors, establishing a market for them and helping secure their heritage for future generations. Creating 'artist bears' for adult collectors quickly became an all-encompassing passion for me, one that I have never tired of and probably never will.

In those days showcasing work was an important element of growing a small business and developing new ideas, so participating in specialist competitions hosted by magazines, seemed a sensible path to take, if I wanted validation for my teddy bear designs. I pushed forward with what I considered exciting new bear designs and despite being in complete awe of my fellow competitors, braved entry into the British Bear Artist Awards in 1997, 1998 and 1999, achieving recognition instantly when my submissions were honoured with awards.  It was a heady time!  Suddenly my bears were invited overseas, exhibited in museums, featured in magazine articles. My order book quickly filled and my telephone didn't stop ringing at all hours. My bears had arrived on the worldwide teddy bear stage!

Auntie Bears was the banner under which my sister Fiona and I sold the bears we designed and made individually. We both loved creating big bold teddy bears and were great friends, besides being good sisters. In fact, it was Fiona who launched our bear-making journey by one day by showing our work to the owners of 'The Rochester Bear Shop'. We were then invited to exhibit at our very first local bear show, hosted by the shop and our bearmaking path was set. Going forward, we shared costs, attended shows together and planned marketing strategies as sisters, working hard to establish 'Auntie Bears' and find our niche in the heart of the teddy bear industry.

So, back to my dusty photographs! I was looking for my earliest teddy bear designs to begin making a book of my earliest work but of our four years as Auntie Bears, I could only find a couple of small slip albums holding photographs. Unfortunately many of my original photographs were disposed of when I moved house in 2007; caught up in the fast paced age of the internet, it didn't occur to me back then, I might find a purpose for those old photographs in the future...

Thankfully, whilst searching for photographs, I also came across boxes of old teddy bear magazines and found many of the articles featuring Auntie Bears and our work as teddy bear designers. Happy memories that made me smile all over again almost thirty years later, reminding me of long forgotten moments in my own teddy bear making history. It was a magical time to begin a bearmaking business and one I now plan to document properly...  I am so glad I kept those magazines!

It hardly seems possible I have now been making teddy bears for the best part of thirty years. Those thirty years have seen many changes in the bear making world, the most significant being the use of the internet to reach out to collectors around the world. These days information can be made available instantly at the press of a button, which is amazing but I do sometimes wonder whether the internet can ever truly convey the dedication to creating teddy bears and many hours of work and skill involved in their production... the passion behind their evolution. I do hope so.

Sadly we have seen the demise of many specialist teddy bear publications, teddy bear shows, shops and competitions worldwide in recent years and yet, collectors still love teddy bears and creators still need to express themselves through the art of their creation. Hopefully, that love and dedication always be sufficient to protect the teddy bear both as an art form and also as a friend, in the disposable digital world in which we now find our much loved Teddy Bear.

The tale of Miguel the Magnificent

I began bear-making before the age of the internet and before it became the norm to own a computer in households throughout the UK.

British Teddy bear 'artists' were inspired by the amazing teddy bear makers in the US, who began a passion for handcrafted teddy bears which miraculously swept across the globe without the aid of the internet, eventually taking a strong foothold in the UK in the early 1990's, in a country well known for its own teddy bear heritage, since the early 1900's.

Creating teddy bears was a passion for me well before I was nudged into selling my work in the mid 1990's. In the 1980's I was a dedicated teddy bear collector of Chiltern Hugmee teddy bears, manufactured in the UK since the early 1920's. By the early 1990's, I had discovered the world of teddy bear artists and was in awe of makers such as Sandra Wickenden, Gregory Gyllenship, Janet Clark, Frank Webster and Sue Quinn, to name but a few! By the mid 1990's, I was inspired to create  my own bears and the rest, as they say, is my teddy bear history!

The years have since crept by and it recently it occurred to me that my earlier, pre-World Wide Web teddy bears, are probably little remembered nowadays because in the days when they were created, I didn't have a website or social media to share my work, so I took photographs of my creations on film cameras, walked into town to have them developed in a shop, then walked home again, to sort and post the photos to interested customers and specialist magazines (in the old fashioned way with an envelope and a stamp!) The spare photographs were dumped into bags, stored in my loft and generally forgotten about as the years ticked by. Many bags of printed teddy bear photographs made their way to the local tip when I moved house seventeen years ago, so will sadly never be seen again. In those days, I simply stored a few favourite teddy bear photographs in traditional photo albums on a shelf. I have promised myself to scan them into my computer and make a proper photo album soon, as it seems such a shame to have lost so much of my earlier teddy bear making history. The older I become, the more I appreciate a need to save images of my work and play my part in preserving the history of the British Artist Bear to share with future generations...

And with that in mind, I will start the process this very moment with one of the very first images scanned into my first computer, many years ago... I think it was taken in 1999, or maybe 1998 - definitely in the days before bear-making took a toll on my eyesight! I was perched on the steps of the house I had lived since 1983. Sat with me was 'Miguel the Magnificent', a huge teddy bear created in alpaca. I was very proud of him and we were having our photograph quickly taken in the garden, before I settled him into a large box and sent him aross the world to America, to meet his new owner...

Shortly before Miguel was made, I won my first 'British Bear Artist Award' in 1998 for a similar bear named 'Himself'. After the awards ceremony, 'Himself' was featured in the 'Teddy Bear Times' magazine and then somehow seen by a lovely collector named Sylvia, who lived in Chicago, in the United States. I wouldn't normally share a collector's name publically, but Sylvia was a huge support to my teddy bear making career, for which I will always be grateful and she was a very kindly lady. Sadly she is no longer with us, but she was an absolute gem within our teddy bear world and as I mentioned, a very kind lady...

One day, Sylvia contacted me and asked if I could make a huge teddy bear for a little friend of hers, a young boy who had been involved in a terrible accident. When she visited him in hospital, she was so sad to see how damaged and frightened he was, so asked how she could help him feel more safe... between them they decided a huge teddy bear would do just that and so she contacted me to make a bear similar to my award winner, 'Himself'. 'Miguel the Magnificent' flew out to his new owner, but sadly, too late. The little boy, too broken to stay, slipped quietly away, before Miguel the Magnificent arrived in the US and so my huge bear was given to his mother to help her through her grief instead. Later his mother donated the bear in her son's memory to a charity where she felt he could continue to help... and a kind donor presented the charity with a significent sum of money, in return for one great big teddy bear, who, before flying out from the UK, had with one fuzzy photograph taken with his maker, perched on her garden steps...

So that was the tale of Miguel the Magnificent. I don't know where he is now but I will never forget his story in my teddy bear history and the memory of a kind hearted lady named Sylvia.