Teddy Talk: Creating, Collecting, Connecting

Thank you, George Orwell. 

Just teasing, Laura, I do agree with you

Upon further reflection, if it was my comments that got the original thread pulled, then I apologize to Daphne as it was not my intent.  If they took my post on the original thread calling for fair and consistent moderation as an impetus to "moderate" that particular thread... their removal of the entire conversation only proves my point.  I remember the case that Laura mentioned.

Best wishes,
Kelly

I think I was the last person to post before it got removed, so I guess if anyone offended them then I did.  However, I don't think anyone was being nasty... myself or anybody else.  The admin had cut-and-pasted the forum rules into the conversation.  I had posted that I wished for real moderators on the forum to enforce those rules, consistently and fairly.  I think I made it very clear that I was not referring to the current advisors, because they DON'T have moderator power.

If that is what annoyed them... then they'll probably delete this, too.  So why are you even reading this?   

How ridiculous.
Kelly

Lynn, if I'm remembering my obscure history correctly... the cables supporting the Brooklyn Bridge were zinc-coated steel, and the originals lasted for something along the lines of 100 years.  I agree with your husband, and wouldn't worry too much about those BBs

Kelly

I'm so sorry, Brenda.  My grandfather (mother's father) lived for many years with a brain tumour.  It was not discovered until he was very elderly.  He had spent so much of his adult life with blinding painful headaches... and the doctors would tell him "don't be a baby! stop complaining!  there's nothing wrong with you!".  So it was, of course, quite large by the time it was discovered. 

My thoughts are with you and your entire family!      :hug: 
Kelly

Hey look, Mindy rigged the Golden Teddies for Teddy Talk, too!  And I didn't think she even had a connection to Teddy Bear Review. 
   

Kidding of course.  WOW, big congratulations are in order!  Another fantastic list of well-deserving winners, so huge hugs to all the nominees!
:hug:  :hug:

Best wishes,
Kelly

Check with your local Chamber of Commerce (or it's Australian equivalent), or small business associations.   I shopped around the local towns' Chambers until I found the best one, then signed on with them.  I get fairly reasonable health insurance rates through them, a lot of various small business perks, and they also linked me to a local credit card processing company.  We bought a very basic machine for a small fee and are charged $5 a month for having the service.  Individual transaction fees are equal or less than what PayPal charges.  It's paid for itself many, many times over by now, and we haven't really had it that long... so it was very worth it.  Some people HATE PayPal and refuse to use it, so it's nice to even give people who buy from you online another option.  And it has been much appreciated that we accept credit cards when we travel to shows.  Our machine is too basic a model to travel with (definitely not a wireless one), so we just use a slider to imprint the card at the show, then punch in the information when we get home.  So far, so good.

Hope this helps!
Kelly

Yes, eBay is pretty much the best source.  There are some well-established fur sellers, just pay attention to the seller's feedback.  Stick with the good ones and you'll be more likely to get exactly what you thought you were getting... in terms of quality, condition and the actual type of fur.

I used to have a second-hand store nearby that I could get good fur coats from.  However, we must have bought a few too many at their fantastic prices, because one day the prices skyrocketed!  Now they are not worth what they are priced at.  Oh well!

The first fur bears my mother made were from a mink stole I bought for $5 at a garage sale.  We were very lucky as it was pristine condition, very clean and excellent quality!  It's hard to get that lucky all the time, though.

Cheers,
Kelly

Wanda, I am so glad your hubby is better and hope the two of you have a wonderful 2007!  And your TOBY was so very, very well deserved!  My mom and I are both so happy for you, sweet lady.  Big hugs from New York!
:hug:  :hug:  :hug:  :hug:  :hug:

Kelly

Oh no, I knew I would miss somebody!  I am so bad with names  :doh:

Big congratulations, Charlotte!  :hug:

Kelly

Tami mentioned keystroke loggers above, that is a very good point to make.  Keystroke loggers are a form of spyware that can "read" what you type into your computer, they are infamous for swiping user IDs and passwords.  If you are not already doing so, obtain and run adware / spyware removal programs on your computer regularly.  The two I use are both free (use both, one may catch things the other may not), they are:

Ad-Aware SE Personal
http://www.lavasoftusa.com/products/ad- … rsonal.php

Spybot Search & Destroy
http://www.safer-networking.org/en/download/index.html

Best of luck to everyone to stay safe out there!
Kelly

If your significant other is into... divorce? 

I apologize in advance, but that's the only thing I know Reno to be associated with!   

:crackup:  :crackup:  :crackup:
Kelly

By the way Mindy, my mother sends her sympathies.  She used to help organize fine art contests (paintings and such).  She said it was like juggling vipers sometimes, and she got torn apart on several occasions.  People get very emotionally invested in competitions, and it can turn otherwise sane individuals into... well... nutjobs.

I was thinking about this situation and realized something.  So, people are accusing Mindy of favoritism to members of Teddy Talk because she occasionally posts on Teddy Talk.  How would they know she was here, if they weren't here, too?

Food for thought.
Kelly

I'm sorry that you had that negativity directed towards you, Mindy!   It is, unfortunately, the season for both winners and "sour grapes".  Yes, there certainly were a lot of people from Teddy Talk that were nominated, and probably will be quite a few for the Golden Teddies as well.  I was thinking about it and realized there were probably some fairly good reasons for it.

#1 Sheer volume and scope of membership.  Many members, some of whom only post VERY occasionally.  Sure, when we congratulated people, we even congratulated people that really aren't "here" anymore.

#2 I remember during last year's contests, how many posts were made encouraging people to give it a try and enter the contests.  Technical advice was given, hands were held... however you want to look at it.  People were encouraged to step outside their comfort zones, have confidence in themselves and take a leap of faith.   Did that result in a surge of entrants from people that read those posts on TT?  I don't know.  There certainly were people from TT who entered this year's contests that did not enter last year.   I also noticed that it seemed like quite a few of the winners this year were international entrants.  This is definitely an international forum.  Did the discussions of the two US contests on this board last year encourage more international artists to try?  Possibly.

You know, it works the other way, too.  There are US artists who have started to enter the non-US competitions now that they did not previously... because they talked to international artists here and decided to give it a go.

Thank you for all your hard work, Mindy.  By the way, you forgot to tip the balance in my favor and give me an award this year.  What's up with that?
:hug:

Kelly

This forum is getting way too big, particuarly for someone as bad with names as I am!  I wish they listed the business name on the nominee lists, I usually recognize bear artists better by their business name.
 

Hope ALL of the nominees on TT have received appropriate recognition!

Hugs,
Kelly

Thanks to Karen for posting the full TOBY list, and *WOW* what a list!  I saw the names of two more Teddy Talkers to congratulate!

Edie Barlishen for her THREE (!!!) nominations... outstanding job!

And Wanda Carson for her Pet Detective tableaux!  I was lucky enough to see this in person at the TBAI show in August, and can vouch that it is exquisite!

Big hugs ladies!  :hug:  :hug:  :hug:
Kelly

Edited to add:
Excellent, thanks everyone for catching the other names!  I edited the title to get them all (I hope), so everybody who doesn't have their own thread can get some well-deserved kudos, too!

Hi Heather,

If it is a show where you expect most of the artists to be driving home after the show instead of staying the night (so mostly locals... say a few hours' drive), letting them out earlier at 3pm will be much appreciated so they can get going.  Also, I'm fine with 10am for a start time... but if you do start it earlier AND the room is in a secure location, consider giving artists the option of setting up their tables the night before.

Re: Daphne's question about keeping collectors into the afternoon hours... hmmm, that's one to think about! 

- How about a public's choice competition, perhaps, with the results announced a few hours before the show ends? 

- Or how about a drawing for a big gift certificate... say $100... but they have to be there in person to receive it AND it's only good at your show (or that day, whatever).  The artists could contribute $5 each to the gift certificate.... and whoever's bear is purchased by that person, the artist would be given the $100 cash by the promoter. 

- Alternately, but along those same lines... a "choose the bear of your choice!" drawing, where the winner gets to pick any bear for sale in the show that they want up to a certain value (again, artist is reimbursed).

- I like Shane's idea of show specials at a certain time.  Usually this is strongly discouraged at show venues (the discounting of merchandise), however I think the chance at "bargains" could REALLY enthuse the customers!  Perhaps at a given time, say 2:00 to 2:15, each artist could mark up to 3 bears on their table with a set discount, say 20%.  Artist's choice on the bears and artists do not need to partipicate if they don't want to.

Edited to add:
You know, now that I think of that last idea a bit more, here's something that would catch people's attention from an advertising perspective...

20 for 20 from 2:00 to 2:20!
20% off select artist bears for twenty minutes ONLY from 2:00 to 2:20 this afternoon!

Ha!  I can just hear that announced through-out the day by the promoter.  I think people might get a kick out of it , and it's certainly something they'd remember!
 

Interesting questions!
Kelly

I couldn't possibly catch up with all the individual posts, WOW! 

Big kudos to all the nominees and hugs to all the entrants!  What an array of great work!  Has everyone been notified at this point?  Can't wait to see the final list, it seems that TT was widely represented!
:dance:  :dance:

Bear hugs,
Kelly

Daphne, can't you live a quiet, boring, uneventful life?  Apparently not 

I'm very sorry the new job was a bust, but I guess better he found out sooner rather than later!  Hopefully this will allow him to regroup and find something much better.  And it's nice that at least you don't have the choas and uncertainty of house-hunting and moving now!

As far as anti-Alzheimers medicine... I think the best you can do is just keep using your brain to make those bears!  Until there really is a medicine for it, all the studies show that really using your brain to think things out over the course of a lifetime really helps.

Hugs  :hug:
Kelly

That is sickening.  I have to see animals suffer, particularly due to human stupidity!  My mother once went for a walk in the neighborhood (this was quite some time ago) and found a very injured baby groundhog by the side of the road, obviously hit by a car and suffering badly.  She came home to get my brother so they could take it to a vet.  As they were carefully bundling it into a towel to pick it up, another woman from the neighborhood walked by and said "Isn't that thing dead yet? It's been there for days!"  ARRRRRRGH!

I hit a deer with my car once a couple of years back, shattered one of it's rear legs.  Still feel badly about it.  But I stayed there with it until a state trooper arrived to put it out of it's misery, I didn't want to think that they might not find him on their own, and that he would die very slowly and painfully as a result.  Very unpleasant for all involved, even the state trooper did not want to have to shoot the deer, but he did what he had to do. 

Hugs,
Kelly

Jennie, your bears are definitely *not* crap!  Please don't use eBay to judge your success or failure, it is such an odd venue.  Right now all of the ways you're trying are online... is there a way you can try to sell your bears NOT online?  Examples would be through magazine submissions, shows and stores.  Personally, we do our best sales at shows, but we only found that out by trying every venue that we possibly could.  If we had only tried eBay at the time, we would have quit two years ago!

My only suggestion would be that when you list on the U.S.-centric "ebay.com", to include a conversion to inches for your bears' heights.  I admit that I had to go get a ruler to figure out how big your bears were in inches, as only the metric height was listed. 

Or how about taking the opportunity to play with some new ideas or styles?  In experimenting, you might find something that is more successful in sales for you than others.  For example, I noticed you do a lot of boy bears, what about trying more little girl bears?  (For some reason in looking at our sales records for 2006, we found out that our girl bears sell faster than our boy bears.  No idea why, though perhaps little girls just appeal more to an overwhelmingly female customer base????  Something to think about, anyway.)

Best wishes,
Kelly

I see I missed more drama again.   

Anyhoo, I think this is a very well thought-out list!  Will answer to the best of my abilities.  While I like the free approach of 'send what you can and accept what you receive', obviously if there is rumbling among the ranks over that approach, then there needs to be some adaptation.

Uh, hate to say this, but that theory is totally false.  At least, I know for a fact that it's false here in the US and Canada... and the search I just did online leads me to believe that the UK follows suit (someone correct me if the UK copyright office tells you otherwise).  The theory of "change a certain number of things and it becomes mine" is an old copyright myth.  I've heard it with "change 20%, change 50%, change 3 things, change 8 things", and so on.  There is no magical number or percentage that makes it true.

If you create a pattern froms scratch, you own the copyright.  If someone else takes the pattern, and changes however many things about it, that second pattern is a DERIVATIVE work off the first.  The only person who can "own" the copyright to a derivative work is the person who owns the copyright to the original.  There are absolutely no exceptions to this rule!  I agree that it is hard to defend copyright in a case like this however, and derivative works I think tend to make for rather difficult court cases.

Best wishes,
Kelly

Kim, 

I think that patterns and fabric fall in a rather grey area, as to whether you can make them for commercial purposes or not.  The best you can do is check the pattern itself and the packaging, and if you don't see anything there you could try calling or emailing the company to make sure.  Sometimes they really don't mind.  Other times, you may find a copyright notice that states "for personal use only", in which case they probably do not want you to knit the pattern for the purposes of selling it, as an accessory to a bear or otherwise.  I know that, for example, the Disney fabric / patterns / designs and Daisy Kingdom brand of fabrics ALWAYS have these notices, "for personal use only" and "no commercial use".

I concur with the answers to your other question... the clothes on the bear do not change whether it is OOAK.

Hope this helps!
Kelly

Nancy is correct above where she mentions that unique visitors are re-set in most tracking software over a certain time period.  So if a statistics counter uses 24 hours as a mark, that means you could visit once as a unique visitor, then come back more than 24 hours later and be counted again as another unique visitor.  However, if you came back sooner than 24 hours after your most recent visit, you would be considered a returning visitor, and not be counted as a unique visitor with the second visit. 

Your hits (and page views) should still go up though, every time you visit and browse through your pages, regardless of whether you are considered to be a unique or a returning visitor.  The only catch here is that if you want to force these numbers to go up by testing this yourself, then you have to force the web pages to re-load in your browser (shift key + reload button), otherwise your browser may be showing you a cached version of the page you visited earlier, and that would NOT count.

Edited to add:
Should probably mention that this testing will also tell if you if your hits are really counting hits by the textbook definition (see Nancy's post above), or being interpreted as "page views" which I see a fair amount of.  If you load your home page 20 times and your hits go up by a much larger number, say 100... then you're counting actual hits (where every individual image and whatnot on the page counts individually).  If your "hits" goes up 20 times, the number of times you forced one page to re-load... then you're really counting page views and they're just calling it "hits".  LOL.

I think the important thing to remember here is that hits AND page views, regardless of what they're called, aren't really considered to be very important in the grand scheme of things.  It's the unique visitors number that really tells you if people are finding your site or not.

Anyway, it doesn't help that all the stats trackers do things a bit differently from each other.  It's all a bit nutty.   
Kelly

I love the thought, but have 3 shows scheduled in that same time period, so I really don't feel that I could commit that many bears.  I would also like to support Bid4Bears though, as others have expressed. 

Nancy, here's a thought.  I participated in your online holiday show and had a lot of fun; one comment that I heard repeatedly from my collectors was that "I was expecting more Christmas and winter-themed bears!".  What about the thought of having seasonal showcases on Bid4Bears?  Choose a week for a spring show, summer show, fall show, winter show and encourage everyone to submit themed bears appropriate for the season.  Make it a real experience!  You could kick off your two month artist challenge listed above with a one-week spring special the first week of April, and encourage even people that cannot commit to bears all of April and May, to submit one or two spring-themed bears the first week of April.   Thoughts, anyone????

Just editing to add a thought... I think more people would be willing / able to commit to a couple of bears 4x a year (roughly 8 bears), then that many bears over 8 consecutive weeks.

My $0.02
Kelly