From sleeves to a Stearnsy Bear

I had a fellow from Monett, Mo drop by the shop last week. He had been on the website and had seen that we do bears out of vintage furs. He had a few pieces to sell. Part of the way we work is being open to whatever may show up. What he had was a great vintage mink stole, a good muton and also something that we had never worked with before. Two pretty good size sleeves made from beaver fur. He didn't know what kind of coat they had come from and neither did we. But they were a cool fur. This is a little picture story about how they turned into a Stearnsy Bear.

This is what we bought. It had a soft, luxurious feel and a fairly dense pile.

This is what it looked like from the back. Many furs but not all are sewn together from very small pelts. If you look close you can see that these were exceptionally small which does make the fur harder to work with. We also didn't have a lot of it to work with which meant that how it was laid out to cut was more important than if you are working with a coat or jacket. You can't redo any of the pieces if you make a mistake.

 We cut out the pieces using our regular patterns, this is a 16" size. Then we cut out and glue white muslin to each piece of fur. We do this to strengthen the fur. Our experience has been that most vintage furs are very fragile and sometimes they will tear like tissue paper. This helps keep that from happening although there are many times what we would call nicks and bruises in each fur. Each fur even of the same type is different depending on the age, how often it was worn, how it was stored, etc. That is also what gives each one it's own character. Then we let the glued pieces dry fro 24 hours.

It's now ready for Vicky to sew.

Vicky sews each piece up inside out. That is one reason that we can't do small size bears from real fur. The pieces are too thick to turn right side out.

After she has sewn the bear up, she finishes the head.

Then I will joint the head as well as the arms and legs to the body. Then it is ready to for the bear to be stuffed. On this bear we had between 10 and 12 hours worth of work.

So here is our first Stearnsy Bear made from beaver fur. It turned out great. The bear was waiting in those sleeves, it just needed to be turned loose.

If the fellow from Monett hadn't come by, we would never had the opportunity to make this bear. We were glad he did.