"Karin Conradi had been buying bears for about six years when her partner, Peter, suggested that she try making one of her own. Although she had never made a bear before, Karin had enjoyed sewing from an early age. She was making her own clothes while still at school, but after spending three years at Croydon College of Art in south London, she opted for a career in photography.

After deciding that photography was not the right field for her, Karin eventually began working with her aunt, Lucienne Day, who designed exquisite silk mosaics. For 16 years, Karin hand-stitched the tiny pieces of fabric together to create the beautiful and highly original pieces of artwork that her aunt had devised. Later, Karin also did some restoration of antique clothing for a dealer in London's King's Road - again carrying out all the work entirely by hand.

Machine-less
When Karin began making her bears, she once more opted not to use a machine to stitch any part of them. She knew that this would enable her to be much more precise when shaping the head, say, or inserting the pads.

It did not feel like work at all - an important consideration for something that was initially intended to be just a hobby. Hobby or not, however, Karin is a perfectionist and she put a great deal of thought into her first creations.

Right from the start, she wanted the bears she made to be entirely her own. So she studied those by other artists to see whether the ones she fell in love with had any qualities in common, and then tried to adapt a pattern to give herself the required results.

For example, she worked out that the proportions and discovered that her favourite bears all had heads that were half as long as their bodies. The legs were generally the same length as the body, while the arms were somewhat longer - and the foreheads were much less pronounced than those on many other bears.

Bear Assembly
It was a struggle to incorporate all the required features into her design, and then to put the resultant bear together. But when she had finished, Karin decided that the bear she had produced was actually quite cute. She set about making some more, and then took them to a couple of bear shops to see what the response would be. She made her first sales immediately.

After that, there was no looking back. Within months she had been voted the Best Newcomer in the 1998 British Bear Artist Awards and the bears had become much more than the absorbing hobby she had anticipated.

In general, each one is different, although she does occasionally make a small limited edition if a shop requests it. And although she found such success with her early designs, she has changed her style considerably over the years. She has, for example, altered the positioning of the head to eliminate the rather hang-dog look of her early creations. The heads, too, are stuffed much more firmly, and while she is filling them she sculpts them to achieve the form. The firm filling also allows the noses to be stitched with greater precision - something that is very important to a perfectionist like Karin.

The heads and muzzles have changed shape as well, as have the proportions of the bodies. Another notable innovation has been Karin's use of fabric dye. Many artists use airbrushes to colour small areas of the mohair, but Karin had used such tools at art college, and never enjoyed the process. She also felt that painting, rather than spraying, the colour on would be much more precise.

Today, she uses around 30 different colours in all to achieve three quite different styles of bears. Some are made to look older, and the dye is used to replicate the kind of discolouration that occurs on well-loved teds. Others are more realistic, and in that case the colour is used to accentuate the features. A third style lies somewhere between the other two.

Karin firmly believes that bears should be left 'in the fur'. Only very occasionally does she decide that one of her older-looking teds would be even more fetching if given something simple to wear, like a little waistcoat. But if a collector specially asks for a dressed bear, she will try to oblige.

'I love the creativity of it,' she says. 'I've always done something artistic, and I love bears, so really I like being able to create them. And I still get a really good feeling when I find that people want to buy them as well.' "

Article by kind permission of Pat Rush