A collection of photos telling the journey of a very sad looking teddy bear I found on a dog walk with a friend. He’d clearly got dropped along the way by his previous owners while walking the same footpath, and spent a long time out in all weathers. I’d been on the look out for a challenging mending project for a while, so I picked him up and brought him home with me, vaguely wondering if this was the daftest idea ever.
He’s badly stained on his legs and lower torso, as if he’s been sat in a muddy puddle for some time. His fur is matted, his features are almost hidden. He was quite a lot of moss growing on his back. He’s got several holes on his arms and legs, plus a big one on his tummy where a lot of stuffing is hanging out. He arrived at our house in a poo bag (a clean one!) because he was damp and nasty and I didn’t want to carry him in my hands.
The first step was to remove all the old stuffing, throw it out. I also rehomed a small spider and 2 tiny snails. (If there had been anything wormy or maggoty living in there, the whole lot, bear and all, would have been out the house and the whole project abandoned faster than you can imagine. Even I have my limits!) The rest of him was given several very thorough washes in hot soapy water. He looks sad and flat but definitely cleaner.
It struck me how being mended can be quite brutal at times. The poor chap was peacefully moldering away in the countryside, minding his own business, before someone started removing all his innards and dunking him in very hot water.
Then some thinking – what colours and fabrics to use for mending him. What techniques would best work for the various types of damage he’d undergone. It takes me a while to mull the options over and work out what weight and flexibility of fabric will be the best match, and what type of mend will work best in each place. This selection of fabrics stayed around for about a fortnight, before I was happy I knew what I wanted to do.
I googled his manufacturer and model from the label on his leg. My best guess is that the pink, fluffy bear on the right is what he originally looked like. Yeah, I was surprised too! He’s not going to end up looking back like he started. Damaged and mended again isn’t worse than pristine and new, but it’s definitely very different.
Making tiny beanbags to replace the perished ones I removed from his paws, to give them some weight.
This is him, mended. The biggest holes are patched with pale denim which was a good match in weight and flexibility to his fur. The tummy hole went across his torso and onto his upper leg and was tricky to mend because it needed to bend in the same way his body did. It’s two half patches, that I joined in the middle, to try and get it to bend in the right way. As you can see, I only partly got that right, I didn’t get the bend in quite the right place, so he sits a bit lopsidedly. But it was not bad for a first attempt at a tricky type of hole to mend. The paw and ear patches are partly to give him some character, and partly cover a couple of holes too.
But – he’s not finished yet. He deserves a nice little outfit to wear.
How hard can it be to make a simple waistcoat, I asked myself. Significantly harder than I expected, it turned out. It took a fair amount of fiddling with a paper mock up, to work out how to get it to fit his shape.
Totally worth all the fiddling around with the waistcoat. I love how friendly and thoughtful his face looks. His name is Iggy, after St Ignatius of Loyola. He sits on my desk and reminds me that even the most damaged and broken of things, people and situations can sometimes be mended, with enough care, patience and skill. I need reminding of that quite often at the moment.
Ragbag Mending 
Fantastic Claire. A wonderfully renewed teddy bear with an equally beautiful message of hope in all the ‘raggedness’ of life x
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