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Creatures of comfort
By BILL COATS, Times Staff Writer
"You can talk to them," bearmaker and bear lover Kathy Glenn says. "It's a lot cheaper than a shrink." Hand-stitched artistry can carry a high price tag, however. Some bears cost up to $500 apiece. TAMPA -- She already knows the color and the size and the texture of the fur. But Kathy Glenn's important moment comes when she begins pushing and twisting polyester fiber fill beneath the fabric. That's when she meets her newest teddy bear. "The fun part is when you start to stuff it and mold it, and you see it take shape," she said. Will the cheeks be chubby or trim? Will the dark, shiny eyes be closely spaced for a wizened look or spread apart, childlike? Will the head tilt innocently upward or thoughtfully downward or quizzically sideways? In Mrs. Glenn's industry, such hand-stitched artistry can fetch prices of $75 to $500 per teddy bear, and no two bears are exactly alike. It is an industry. At least two glossy magazines compete for the teddy bear trade. One coveted teddy sold for $190,000 at an auction in Monaco in 2000, according to Teddy Bear Review. The business is fueled by collectors, some of whom have thousands of teddy bears. Bayshore Beautiful resident Vera Templeton, 81, started collecting them a couple of years ago. She said she always wanted to make bears but didn't know how until she attended a class taught by Glenn. Now, she feels especially close to those bears. "I sometimes talk to them," she said. "To me they are alive because it's something I've created." Eleven bears make a den of her home. If that sounds like a lot, consider Terri Granger's brood. "I thought I had about 50 until my husband made me count them," said Granger, a high school chemistry teacher from Lutz. "I had 200. Now, it's probably around 240." Mrs. Glenn estimates she has about 100. Every spring, collectors descend on an annual teddy bear convention staged in Tampa by Time for Teddies, the bay area teddy bear club. Mrs. Glenn, 47, is president. This year's event, today and Saturday at Tampa's Doubletree Airport Hotel, will bring some 50 bear artists from as far away as Washington state and England, Mrs. Glenn said. A charity auction tonight will benefit the Spring, the domestic violence center; last year's auction generated $9,000, Mrs. Glenn said. The teddy bear industry just celebrated its 100th anniversary. It doesn't date to the invention of the teddy bear, but to a 1902 Mississippi bear hunt by President Theodore Roosevelt. A bear, fighting with hunting dogs, was clubbed into submission by a hunting guide, who tied it to a tree to await Roosevelt. But Roosevelt insisted that nobody shoot such a helpless animal. Another hunter put it out of its misery with a knife. The bear promptly became a topic of political cartoons, as Teddy's Bear. Toy makers weren't far behind. Stuffed teddy bears evolved into the national comfort toy, soft and cuddly. "You can talk to them," Glenn said. "It's a lot cheaper than a shrink. We in the business call it "bearapy,' instead of therapy." Mrs. Glenn, a South Carolina native, studied to be a veterinarian but became a mother instead. She never owned a teddy bear until 1987, when she was into craftmaking. Then she was smitten by an odd teddy bear: white with brown and black spots. "The more I looked at it over the course of a year, I said, "I can do that.' " Mrs. Glenn has been making bears ever since. Among artists, she is a color innovator, experimenting with dyes and calico effects. "She has a technique of doing it," said Mrs. Granger, a fellow member in Time for Teddies. "It's really different." "She's selling bears at shows when others are not." Only lately has Mrs. Glenn's work approached full time, since the youngest of her three sons left the Gaither High School band and Mrs. Glenn left the band boosters. She has begun negotiating to sell her bears through stores and teaches bearmaking classes at sewing and quilting centers in Carrollwood, Tampa and Dade City. But she cleared her calendar in recent weeks to prepare for the spring convention. Mrs. Glenn has sat in her shed-studio on Deer Lake Road and worked four to five bears at a time through various stages of production. Each takes six to eight hours. They include a bear from red fabric with tan fur and a pure white bear, sporting butterfly wings in an American-flag design. She will display 20 to 25 bears at the convention and watch the faces of passers-by for "a connection," the moment of love at first sight. It's the core reason Mrs. Glenn does this. "That's really satisfying to know that I can make something that will really touch and that they will enjoy," she said. -- Staff writer Shari Missman Miller contributed to this report. -- For information about classes in South Tampa, contact Keep Me In Stitches, 4237 W Kennedy Blvd. at 282-1526.
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