Bearly There

I cannot believe I have never written about my bear phone cozies!!!

I designed my first phone cozy back in about 2012, when we still had flip phones. I had to borrow a phone from a boss to get the measurements right.


Turned out I could fit my flip phone in an iPhone 3-sized bear if I didn't mind a little extra breathing room inside the bear. The extra space was the perfect size for a house key, my plastic wallet snap box and a couple of dollars.


At the time, I thought my bear phone cozies were just about the coolest invention on the planet. I'd designed bear toilet paper cozies the year before, and they'd been a hit both in my Etsy shop and during my annual Christmas craft fair at work.


Before that, I'd made more than a handful of bears, and the greeting cards I made from the photos were as huge hit at the annual Christmas craft fair as the actual bears.


I thought I wouldn't be able to keep up with orders for bear phone cozies.

Unfortunately, my bear charisma must have been wearing off. Orders didn't pile up. I did sell a few on Etsy, but not a single one sold at the craft fair. I adopted one of the bear phone cozies when I got my first iPhone, and I carried it everywhere, thinking I'd start a fad. No such luck.


So imagine my surprise and delight after receiving an email out of the blue last week inquiring about a custom bear phone cozy... for a larger iPhone. I'm still on the iPhone5, so I had to borrow a friend's phone to achieve the right size.

The special request was for a black bear that would hang on a white backpack emblazoned with black skulls. I asked the potential buyer if she would like black reflective yarn or plain black yarn. She said to use whatever I thought looked best. I used the reflective yarn for the body and the solid black for the head and paws. I like to have something reflective dangling from my backpack for visibility at night, and the nights are getting longer. So reflective is handy, right?

I had to tweak the bear quite a bit to get it to fit to the larger-size body! I had to rip out every prototype bear body part at least three times before I finally came up with a size that looked right.


Then came the battle of the eyes. The beads I've used for all my other yarn bears were not big enough for the new bear head. I had to make a trip to Michael's (because that's right near the park and ride), where I hoped to get real stuffed animal eyes. No such luck. They don't stock them. So I bought four different kinds of large beads, including glow-in-the-dark pony beads. I knew my little neighbor would get a real kick out of those if I don't use them on a bear.


The potential buyer and I emailed back and forth for about an hour solid the night I finished the cozy while she tried to pick which eyes she liked best. I pinned the eyes on for photos to give her an idea of how each set of beads would look.

She was crazy over the idea of glow-in-the-dark eyes but ultimately picked the "funky black eyes with blue-green irises".




After a full week of bear construction, deconstruction and reconstruction, the newly listed bear phone was sold!!! The eight-minute listing was my fastest sell ever! The bear phone cozy was in the mail to its new owner the next hour (accompanied by a skullflake, because what snowflake would be better for someone who carries a skull backpack?!?). And now I get to go back to Blockheading and snowflaking!








Linking up with Busy Hands Quilts, Crazy Mom Quilts and Confessions of a Fabric Addict.

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