a Teddy Bear is born

I make Quilts.  For a long time, quilts were the only thing I could make!  That's not to say I didn't try other things, because I absolutely spent a stupid amount of money on wasted chopped up fabric, and patterns that I still have sitting in a bottom drawer in my sewing room.  I will never forget the evening I made my husband a pair of shorts!  He loves the Oakland Raiders, so I decided I was going to buy some cotton Raiders fabric to make him some drawstring pants to wear around the house.  Notice I said pants AND shorts, well that's because I didn't get nearly enough fabric to make long pants for a grown man, so I was already off to a bad start!  
I got a cheap pattern from Walmart, and I was so excited.  I started to unfold this thin pattern paper and quickly realized it was huge, and it was all over the floor, and I had no idea how to read it, or what it all meant.  So shorts it is! Because in my mind of logic they were smaller, and surely better.  I cut, and I struggled, and I struggled some more.  I re-read the pattern 50 times, and I ended up with a pair of shorts that would fit a Sumo wrestler.  They were enormous!  My husband modeled them in the dining room and we laughed until we cried, and then I put them in a box.  

I didn't think of that pair of funny shorts again until a few years ago when I needed a little girl birthday gift, in a hurry.  I went to that same bottom drawer full of patterns, and I found three super cute little girl dress patterns!  Yes!  I could do this! They were small, and they didn't have very many pieces, and I had grown a lot over the years.  The instructions actually made sense, and before long I had a few little dresses, all different colors and sizes, and I loved them!  I wrapped up one little dress, along with some other little girl things and headed to a birthday party.  The dress was a big hit, and I felt good!  Sure enough, someone asked me while at this birthday party if I could make a stuffed animal, an elephant I think she wanted, and  I quickly said NO!  This lady has no idea what I went through to get to this point, she's lost her mind asking for stuffed animals, right?  Well.... you guessed it.  I found my party going behind in the Hobby Lobby a few hours later digging through the pattern drawers.  I got frogs, and dogs, and teddy bears, and elephants and all kinds of stuffed animals!  I got the stuffing, I got some cute flannel fabric and I was pumped!  I was going to have a regular farm in the sewing room!  WRONG!  I hated every single pattern I bought!  The frog legs were so long and skinny I gave up, the teddy bear had way too many pieces and after hours of struggling his head didn't fit his body quite right.  It was a complete disaster. 

So I locked myself in my sewing room until I could make sense of something! 
The only thing that made sense was to make a simple pattern myself that I liked, based around all of these that I didn't like.  That day was the birth of my custom Teddy Bears.  I started making them with quilting cotton and my very simple pattern and they looked crisp and clean, and I love making them!  Each one is a little different, and they are all adorable.  Sometimes I make them for kids, and sometimes I make them for adults and they almost always have a name or a quote embroidered on their belly.  They make great new friends and they just make people smile.  But, sometimes I make them and they are full of memories and tears, with love and meanings, because I use clothes, instead of fabric from the store.  Memory Teddy Bears make a beautiful unique gift that fill a room with love.  But, no matter the occasion, everyone loves a teddy bear.    
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