Baby Hope, my little black bear, won 2nd place in the miniature undressed category. That's a great success for such a small bear, only 9cm/3.6inches, but that's not all:
Baby Hope also received a nomination for the British Bear Artist Award in the International Artist- category, and that is really a great success:
Like the Euro-Teddy, the BBAAs have several different categories, for small bears, large bears, dressed and undressed. Unfortunately, only British Artists can enter those categories. Everybody else, who is not British, has to enter the International Artist categoy, no matter what kind of bears they make. So, you can imagine what it means to be among the top six in that category, and I'm really, really proud on little Hope.
For the complete list of nominations just go to http://www.britishbearfair.co.uk/
Once again, they were inspired by George Clooney's wonderful film "Leatherheads".
Of course, educated fans will know that "You are my sunshine" is from a different film, so I guess I have to explain something: In spring 2008 I discovered an old crafts book from the 1930s on a little flea market. I bought it just out of couriosity to see what kind of crafts people were doing back then. Then, it turned out that the book was a collection of beautiful patterns for different crafts like knitting, stitching and crochet and I decided that I wanted to work with them by dressing my bears in the style of that time.
Then, a few weeks after I bought that book, "Leatherheads" was in the cinema and it was the perfect inspiration for my bears. I love to come back to both the film and book if I need some more inspiration, exspecially for competitons.
This time, I alsi had this beautiful silk fur. Originally, I ordered it for my cats, but when it finally arrived, it was just a little bit too yellow, so I decided to use it for my Leatherheads-bears instead. For their clothes, I naturally chose fabrics that match the fur and when thinking about a name for the competition, the first thing that came to my mind was "You are my sunshine" and I thought it was perfect and I could be sure that the judges would understand it without any further explanations and as you can see, it worked.For me, these little bears are still my Leatherheads bears and who knows, the director might be pleased to hear that his film won one more award.
I would like to use this post to send a very, very special thank you to George Clooney for making such a beautiful and inspiring film and helping me to become the artist that I am now.
