There are many things that people have missed whilst the shops have been closed due to the Covid lockdowns in England.

I am one of the lucky ones, in that we have good local shops that have kept us well supplied with food and drink and all the other necessities of life without any need for unnecessary travel or panic buying.

My life is home-based and I’m not that sociable anyway – plus I’ve had the added bonus of my partner being around, instead of working away in London all week and only home at weekends. I haven’t even really missed restaurants (because my partner is a truly excellent cook) or the pub (because supermarkets generally have better wine than pubs!)

One thing I have missed though, is charity shops. They have always been the source of most of my making materials, initially by necessity, when I was without the cash to splash on new clothes or fabrics. But gradually, charity shop shopping became a way of life.

It’s not that I was ever in danger of running out of fabric. In fact, I haven’t really needed to buy anything much to be able to keep making throughout the past year of lockdowns, since my verging on shamefully abundant hoarding of every snip and scrap of stuff that comes my way finally turned out to be a blessing, rather than the curse I had thought it might be turning into.I have made good use of the things I already have, to make the things I make. The few bits I might have been in danger of running out of were all things I usually buy online anyway – glass eyes, thread, glue, etc, so I just ordered them in the normal way and waited a bit longer for them to arrive.

However, more than just a pleasurable pastime or the opportunity to bag a bargain, charity shops provide me with something else, something that isn’t always easy to find at home. A revelation that emerged from lockdown was that the new-old materials that turn up unexpectedly in my local charity shops, are actually the major source of my inspiration.

It only takes a rummage through a pile of old-but-new-to-me fabrics to get the ideas flowing. “What could I make with that?” my brain ponders to itself, as I unearth some piece of unpromising-looking tat.

That is what I have missed.

So I’ve had to learn to find my inspiration elsewhere.

There’s always Pinterest, of course. And Instagram. I’ve been a fan of both for a long time. But I try not to spend too much time looking at other people’s finished work (lovely though it is) because it can, if you’re not careful, have a tendency to filter through into influencing one’s own ideas a little too much.So I’ve watched programmes about all kinds of things. And read stories. And dreamt things up. And, of course, I have looked online at fabric… well, you do, don’t you? (Well I do anyway).

The one downside of using charity shop “found” stuff for my makes is that often, it’s just not the best material for the job at hand. That lovely orange furnishing velvet? Beautiful, yes, and a bargain, and suggestive of tiny fox dolls…
But experience reveals that it is also too thick for tiny limbs, too fray-ey to not shred when you try to turn them and altogether more difficult and tricksy than most people would put up with for the uses that my mind’s eye imagined for it.

For me, this has always been just the way things are. My bargain charity shop finds have made me learn how to take unpromising and unsuitable materials and make them do more or less what I want them to do. To develop techniques. To find workarounds. To tweak and cheat and faff fabrics into submission – and tease my dolls and bears into existence by hook or by crook.

This has been a long and fruitful learning process, and one that I am glad to have experienced.But without new charity shop finds, I’ve had to look online when I want something new and inspiring to work with. And not being able to see and feel fabric before parting with my cash (usually a lot more cash than a charity shop would demand) has made things difficult.

I’ve made some mistakes. But because I have that background in making do and using what I have, I’ve managed to make pretty much all of my bad internet buys work anyway – even if not for their intended purposes – simply because that’s what I’ve always done.

If this has sometimes been time consuming and frustrating, I tell myself that it’s part of what makes my work unique: nobody else uses the same fabrics I do – perhaps because nobody else is daft enough to attempt such time-consuming folly!Most vintage bears (and modern artist bears – I’m talking about the expensive collectors’ ones, not your average toyshop soft toys) are made from specialist materials, developed specifically for the purpose of bear making. This was a revelation to me. Although because these fabrics are usually hideously expensive and therefore clash with my thrifty, charity-shopping aesthetic, I’ve never bought any (except for one lucky snippet that turned up in a bag of scraps). I’ve kept a constant lookout for more, but none ever appeared at a suitable price.

Until now.

While browsing online recently I stumbled upon some not-cheap-but-definitely-a-lot-more-affordable-than-usual specialist bear making materials. And, having just gone through a particularly frustrating couple of days making a tiny bear from an old stretchy and fray-ey fun-fur cushion cover with holes in it, bought long ago from a charity shop, I thought “HELL YES – LET’S DO THIS!” and bought some.

Just a couple of fat sixteenths, as a little experimental look-see.

Oh. My. Goodness.

Now I understand. Now I get it. The scales have fallen from my eyes and suddenly everything makes perfect sense.

I used my new fabrics to make a couple of little bear heads and finished one of these into a fully jointed bear.

And hallelujah! A revelation! They are an absolute dream to work with!They don’t fray, which means that you can have tiny seam allowances and not require time-consuming workarounds just to ensure your work doesn’t fall to pieces when you try to turn or stuff it.

They don’t stretch, so you don’t get distorted heads and bodies, or stitches that pop, or stuffing poking through.

They are neither too thick nor too thin.

They do not give you blisters from prolonged hemostat usage, or cause you to stick the blunt end of your needle through your finger-end when trying to push it through the fabric.

They aren’t slippery like linen, or tricksy like velvet (the nap of which actually moves your carefully-pinned pieces about subtly, so that you don’t sew them where you intended to sew them) or just HORRIBLE like most synthetic fur fabrics.

They don’t upset my sewing machine, or gunk it up with fluff, or break it’s needles, or chew up its thread, or require a special foot, or make me cry. Or swear.

It’s a whole new world, I can tell you.

A revelation. ♥