Nostalgia - Traveling Treff

This post is inspired by two topics.
The first one is my love to Steiff's Treff dog, the second one is the fascinating (and frustrating) world of parcel delivery, hence the title.

Let me tell you about Treff first.
From the very start of our Steiff collecting on, this bloodhound has had my heart. Although there are a lot of Steiff dogs I love, Treff has always been my favorite.
I couldn't even tell you why exactly. Is it the long ears, is it the cute nose? The color, the airbrushed details in the face, the eyes? I guess it's the whole package.

Over many years, a few of them made it into the collection, all of them sitting in different sizes from 4 to almost 20 inch (not in all nine sizes, though), in mohair and velvet. These are smaller ones, the big ones sit in the back of the cabinet and I'll admit I didn't want to move the animals in front of them.

Treff was a popular dog not just with me and therefore stayed in the Steiff lineup from 1928 to 1938, also standing up, as a ride animal, with a music box inside, on a pincushion -  and as a puppet on which I had had my eager eye on from the beginning.

I don't know if you have noticed it in the group photo, but their eyes don't all look the same.
The design was patented, the eyes are not just sewn on, but embedded and part of them is covered by the fabric for the distinctive bloodhound look.
As quoted by Steiff Gal, Steiff's US distributor Borgfeldt once wrote "the slanting, half-covered eyeball, which gives this dog’s face a particularly thoughtful, intelligent expression."
In fact, however, you see Treffs where the eyes don't look like that because the fabric has slipped behind the eye. I usually leave them like that because I don't want to mess with the eye and fabric to avoid tearing.

Can you see how the look changes?

I'm in love with the Steiff animal hand puppets and especially with the pre-war ones, and when a Treff finally turned up for sale after years, the ex got it for my birthday.
Probably only a collector will be able to imagine my excitement waiting for the parcel.

And that brings us to the wonders of postal services ...
Back then you didn't get emails and you didn't have live tracking. Delivery notices were still on cards being thrown in your mailbox telling you to pick the parcel up elsewhere although you had been home all day.
What was really disturbing in this case, though, was not getting a notice or a parcel, but then being told that the parcel had been delivered ...
What had they done to my Treff??

So I called the hotline. At least I didn't have to deal with a chatbot back then, but of course I still had to "number press" my way through to a human who then explained to me that I would have to call a sorting center in Munich.
I live 200 km from Munich. The parcel didn't go via Munich. "Doesn't matter, you have to call Munich". Once I finally had a person on the phone there ... you may have already guessed it ... "Why are you calling us?" "Heck if I know, the hotline said ..." "Yeah, you are wrong here, try the hotline again." With the help of a little whimpering and begging from me not to send me back there, they gave me at least the direct number to the right sorting center near us.

There I got to talk to a very nice man who had strange news for me. Yes, the parcel had been delivered today, yes, they had a signature from my husband. Stop, stop ... we always had both names on parcels because of our different names, but I had been home, not he.
I asked him what the name was and he didn't hesitate to tell me, so my next question was if it was difficult to read and he said not at all. I explained to him that it couldn't be my husband's signature for two reasons - he wasn't home and his signature was absolutely not readable because it didn't even have individual letters. He said he'd fax it to me (yes, it was that long ago) which only confirmed what I knew already.
WHO had MY Treff?

I was worried and angry because after all we are not only talking a certain financial but also emotional value. This isn't something easily available for replacing.
He promised to send the parcel guy by our house to see if it helped him remember the parcel and where he had taken it to.
When he called me back, he let me know that my parcel had been delivered to a town three miles from here. To a different person in a street with a different name who had seen - of course because the address had been correct and readable - that it wasn't for him, but decided to keep the parcel "just in case". What case? That the actual owner wouldn't investigate?
Of course, they didn't tell me the name of the person, but does it sound to you as if that was an honest mistake? I didn't even believe that person had the same last name as my husband.
At any rate, the next day Treff traveled to the right house and here he has been ever since.

Nostalgia - Frankenwolf and friendship

Let me tell you a bit about my girl Frankenwolf.
Frankenwolf has to thank my friend Jenn and a mutual friend of ours for her existence. Said friend - also a collector - had asked her at one time to take a Steiff puppet and a Steiff figure and turn them into a new creation.
That inspired Jenn to do the same with Frankenwolf.

Now that might sound quite gruesome to you, beheading two Steiffs and sewing them together, but of course that's just part of the story.
Let's have a look at Frankenwolf's donors.

Steiff has a long history of making German Shepherd dogs, they have been around for over 100 years. Their ancestors, however, still had a bad image which was probably the reason why it took until 1956 before they appeared in Steiff's production.
The first Steiff wolf was a hand puppet named Loopy after the Latin "lupus" which means wolf. That's not surprising to me as there weren't just nice, cuddly puppets, but it could also be useful to have a "villain" (like our childhood non-Steiff devil who was my favorite with his red head). Loopy was produced from 1956 to 1978. He had an open mouth with four fangs and a long red felt tongue. It wasn't unusual for fangs and/or tongues to get lost during play eventually, though.

I always called the one on the right Grandma Wolf,
she seems to be a very happy wolf.

The wolf remained a rare animal in Steiff's line. There are two sizes of a standing Loopy - the smaller one has a closed, the bigger one an open mouth - which were only made for one year in 1964 (one of my personal favorites). Later wolves sometimes turned up as a companion, for example with a Red Riding Hood doll or a polar bear.
The puppet used for Frankenwolf was in very bad shape. Actually, it's surprising that it still had all the fangs. Before throwing the head away as well, though, this was definitely the better choice.

The body was taken from a Micki figure who had a different problem.
First a (very short) word about Mecki. He's a hedgehog who originally came from a German puppet film and became the mascot of a TV magazine where he got his own cartoon. Mecki's wife is called Micki, the children Macki and Mucki. The character had always been quite popular (to be honest, I have never been a fan myself), so Steiff got themselves the licensing rights and made their own versions of the whole family from 1951 on.
Now the early versions had a little problem. The heads were made from rubber which tended to dry out and deteriorate. Later versions were made of a different material.

Pictures by NoName_13 via Pixabay

Well, and Micki had the same problem, but her body was quite okay (even if she had lost her apron and her shoes are a bit scuffed).
Jenn also added a tail and different arms.

Frankenwolf means more to me, however, than just being a unique addition to my collection.
A few years ago I told a little about how I met Jenn. The ex and I were in the USA for the first time and got the chance to visit FAO Schwarz in San Francisco (which closed down over 20 years ago). Steiff made some wonderful and desired FAO Schwarz specials over the years some of which you can see in this video. We were like children in a candy store ... no, wait, toy store 😉

FAO Schwarz Manhattan, picture by Rob Young
 from the UK, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia

When we had exhausted ourselves (and our wallets just a little bit), we asked if there was something like an American Steiff club or a way to get in contact with other collectors. They didn't have any information on that, but they gave us Jenn's number (let me remind you that data privacy wasn't such a big thing yet back then and in this case I'm very glad about that). Jenn had repaired studio Steiffs - amazing lifesize plush animals - for them before.
Then we sat in our hotel room and the ex decided I had to call Jenn. I was so nervous. How do you explain best to a stranger that you got their number from the toy store because you are a German Steiff collector? I needn't have worried. After five minutes, she offered to show us around everywhere. I told her that unfortunately we were leaving the next day, and that could have been the end of it - but it wasn't.
We exchanged addresses and started writing each other letters, then we went from letters to phone calls which might show you how important this had become for us. This was before cell phones and texting, emails or chats.

The next year we went to the US again and that time we would meet Jenn in San Francisco and I would go home with her where the ex would join his conference was over. That was also when I fell in love with White Dude, by the way, the cat that the previous residents had left behind at Jenn's place and who went back to Germany with us as her own cats didn't want him there, little punks (I loved them, anyway).

That was almost 35 years ago.
We visited Jenn, she visited us, later just me. We have a lot of stories and memories, good ones and not so good ones because that's how life is.
I wish we didn't have about 5,800 air miles between us and could just hang out, have tea (or tap water that she insists on 😉) and cake, talk, laugh, and do fun stuff. The distance makes spontaneous dates just a tad difficult. Time difference and work schedules can also make it difficult to talk, but when we do, we get a lot of stuff covered.

When I said that Frankenwolf means more to me than just a toy, this is what I mean. Friendship. She does ... and my little gnome you have seen before does ... and the surprises Jenn got me on fleamarkets, the teddies she taught me how to sew, and the time she gave me a duplicate key to her place as a sign of her friendship which actually made me tear up.
Can someone please finally invent that transporting device that I need so badly?
But even if we haven't seen one another for several years, we think of each other, and I sure hope I made her ears ring now. As we always say to each other at the end of a call .... love ya, my Jenn.

Nostalgia - Snails

"When Mr. Peter Knoppert began to make a hobby of snail-watching, he had no idea that his handful of specimens would become hundreds in no time. ... 'I never cared for nature before in my life,' Mr. Knoppert often remarked - he was a partner in a brokerage firm, a man who had devoted all his life to the science of finance - 'but snails have opened my eyes to the beauty of the animal world.'"
That's from the beginning of one of Patricia Highsmith's short stories about humans and snails, this one being "The Snail-Watcher", the other one "The Quest for Blank Claveringi" (both of which you can find here (although there are two versions for "The Quest")).

Highsmith loved snails and kept hundreds of them as pets. She took them along to parties sitting on lettuce in her handbag and she smuggled them into France in her bra because she didn't want to leave them behind in England.
I read both of her snail stories at a young age in an anthology, but "The Snail-Watcher" impressed me more, and the image my mind formed of the ending has its own little room in my head jumping out every time I see a snail.
If you know the stories, you can imagine why. Have I mentioned it being a horror anthology?

There are other snails in my childhood memories, like the freshwater snails in the ponds of the park near my home.

We used to walk around on the walls and look for snails (we always left them there in case you wonder). From what I remember, my guess is that they were great ramshorn and great pond snails. There were fewer of the ramshorns, and I was convinced that this made them the Queens of the Snails, so it was very exciting to see one of them.

Left: Great ramshorn snail
Right: Great pond snail
Picture by Se90 - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0

Of course, we were also fascinated by land snails (not slugs, they creeped me out, especially after a big rain when the path up to the woods was covered with them, it looked like an invasion). The most common one you see here is the garden banded snail, but it was special to find escargots (which we call "Weinbergschnecken", literally "vineyard snails").
My friend and I once found two of them in the street and decided to put them in a safe spot in a garden, but the garden owner was outside and told us not to dare, so we left them on a wall (although they and other kinds of snails are no pests!). Afterwards, I worried a lot about their fate for quite some time, thinking we should have found a really safe spot. Sorry, little snails!
I would also like to apologize for being one of those annoying kids who sometimes poked your eyes to see you pull them in and for picking you up by your shell, we didn't know that it can hurt you.

Actually, I haven't seen any escargots in the wild in years, but snails kept inspiring me in my creative journey, in wire wrapping, needle felting, and bead embroidery.

And then there is Nelly of course.
Nelly came in two colors, blue and brown with spots, and a size of 10 cm. In the 60s, Steiff had a few designs that were only produced for a short time - 1961 to 1963 for Nelly - and were quite unusual for cuddle buddies.

Beside Nelly, there were for example bats and colorful spiders (and I could still cry over the story the lady from the toy store told us about not being able to sell them and throw them out instead of candy during the town's carnival parade, argh!).
When the ex and I got our first Steiff price guide, we immediately knew we wanted to have all of them, not for their rarity, but because we thought they were really cute (I still think that).

Nelly is made from cotton velvet with faux leather underneath and has a painted rubber shell and rubber tentacles/feelers whose ends were prone to break off as you can see on one of them.
Isn't this little pair adorable?

Did you notice something about them, though? With those shells they are no land snails and I never thought about that until today. I wonder why Steiff made that choice.

There you have it, my snail memories.
I spared you one when I inadvertently ste.... nah, let's forget about that.

Nostalgia - How toys become real

A few weeks ago, I read "The Velveteen Rabbit or How Toys Become Real" for the first time. The book isn't a children's classic here in Germany, but I had seen it mentioned every, now and then and figured it was about time to read it.
If you don't know it, here's the plot.

Not a velveteen, but an artificial silk plush Steiff
bunny from the 1940s (not complete, but in
wonderful condition)

There are different kinds of collectors.
Collecting can be about diversity of items, a shared detail, about the monetary value or the emotional one, about the perfect or the imperfect look, about color, about use, about rarity, about history, about sentimentality ... I could keep going on like this.

As a collector of Steiff animals, I can say that a unplayed with vintage Steiff, possibly even complete with button, chest and ear tag which get ripped off easily by children's hands (no safety buttons back then), has something very special. It never fails to make me wonder how that is even possible. Has it spent the last 50, 70, 100 years or more in a cabinet, never touched? Has it been living in a bubble (I use the word "living" on purpose, you'll see why)?
I would lie if I said I don't know how breathtaking an old "new" Steiff can be. There are collectors who only look for those, and they are ready to pay the price for the (often) few chosen ones.

And then there are the others.
I'll never forget the fleamarket where I found this little fellow. I ran to drag the ex over to the stand to let him know I had fallen in love.

Now you might not understand how someone can fall in love with the obvious victim of a moth attack that has swingy limbs.
You might even think that this is a bit yucky or disturbing.
I, however, saw an 80 year old friend (over 100 now).

A child loved him so much that he stayed around although he had lost most of his fur, loved him so much that someone made the effort to give this little fellow new paw pads from white leather (now worn as well), sewn on very neatly and secure.
I remember how on edge I was as a kid when my own teddy had holes in his felt paw pads and I watched my mother sew on new fabric ones.

The child is probably not here anymore, but he is, and oh, the stories he could tell! Maybe he was like my teddy and saw his child grow up and get old before ending up at a fleamarket in Marin County just to be found by a pair of Germans and being taken back to within 60 kms from where he once came.

The velveteen rabbit is told: "Real isn't how you are made ... It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real." ...
"Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."
Spoiler alert: The nursery magic Fairy turns him Real, a real little rabbit.

I have no doubt that this teddy became Real to his child like the velveteen rabbit to his boy because he was loved (even though he still has his shoe button eyes). Maybe he's still waiting for his fairy and I'll happily give him the spot with some other teddy friends to do so.

Because that's the kind of collectors we were and there are others like us. They don't just love the perfect ones, they love the loved ones, the played with, the "flawed" ones those we wish could tell us their stories, all of them, not just the good ones ...
Just saying.
Each of them has their own beauty.

Nostalgia - Wooden Steiff toys

Some years ago when I still did the "Finds of the week" posts, I had some called "I'm a collector" in which I shared vintage items. Over time my collections have mostly stopped growing due to different reasons, but they are still there and still loved. I also have vintage items, some inherited, some gifts, some from fleamarkets, some more interesting than others. So I thought it could be fun to share some of them every, now and then and tell their story.

In my post about the Teddies for tomorrow, I had mentioned that there were times when material for Steiff plush animals became scarce because mohair and felt were used for other purposes, for example uniforms (plush animals would have been so much better), and that they used substitute materials, but also produced wooden toys.
Today I want to show you just a few that I pulled from my cabinets - literally pulled which wasn't easy because of course all of them were in the back, it's going to be fun to fit them back in - and mention some others at least.

Let's start with the "Pyramidenkubus" (pyramid cube), also available under the name "Satzkubus" (set cube), in its original box - a set of six hollow cubes with one side missing for nestling them in the box.
Given they probably got stacked and then knocked over, it's amazing there's any color left.

We'll stay in the builder's world a little longer.
Here we have the "Bausack" (building bag) which was linen from 1951 to 1958 and held 100 small building blocks, later it was also available with big blocks in a plastic bag.
I have never counted to see if there are all 100, by the way.

Can't afford your own shipping line yet? Start small with the "Schiffsbaukasten" (ship building set)! It's always good to be prepared.

And yet another building set, the "BiBau", probably called that because the blocks are from two different natural woods in two colors - mahogany and maple.
My guess is that the maple was never as light as on the box because I've seen another box with blocks in similar colors. As you can see, the box has never even been opened, so I think it doesn't have to do with dirty children's hands 😉

Do you have ten black thumbs just like me? No problem.
Build your own flowers from plastic stems and wooden leaves and blossoms!
Look, even I can do it.
Of course, the box is a gross exaggeration of what you can do with the set. My set is complete and I couldn't even build a one color flower. You'd probably need like three boxes to create what's in the picture.

Steiff didn't just force you to build things.
They also made beautiful wooden animals, especially pre-war, but I don't have any of those.
I do have two of the later wood burning series, however. There were many more, wisents, dogs, bears, cats, rabbits, zebras, lions, squirrels, camels, elephants, cows, and who knows what else (without looking it up) - and these two cuties.
See the metal tags instead of the "button in ear"?

That's not all of course.
Steiff made little and bigger trains, agricultural and construction vehicles, puzzles, tiny bird houses, toy boxes, hobby horses, hand wagons (I have one of those, but it's misused as a storage box right now, so sorry, no picture), small or slightly bigger scooters (I have some of those, hard to take pictures of), YoYos, horse wagons.
If you are interested, check out this page which has some wooden Steiff listed.

I think my favorite wooden Steiff is this one, though. You'll see why.

Looks harmless enough, doesn't it?
It can be very dangerous if you try to drive to your field in the morning and get ambushed, though! 😂

After Midnight and Harlekin

What do you think when you hear Steiff (if you know Steiff at all, that is)?
Your first thought probably goes to soft and cuddly plush animals for children. If you are a collector or, erm, old or maybe even both like me, you might think of mohair which is not so soft.

Actually, Steiff has used a lot of different materials over the years.
Before they started making toys, the founder Margarete Steiff had a business making felt clothing for women, and in fact the first animals were from felt as well, like the famous elephant pincushion which became so popular as a toy that it shifted the business from clothes to toys.
Other fabrics used were velvet and linen, and with the birth of the teddy bear mohair. Mohair is from the hair of the angora goat and Steiff always got it from the Schulte company, today one of the last weaving mills existing in Germany.

There were times, however, when materials like felt and mohair became scarce, for example in and around wartimes when they were used for military purposes instead like for uniforms.
Steiff always did its best to meet those challenges and come up with toys from substitute materials or to make toys other than plush animals, like a variety of wooden toys like building blocks, wooden flower building sets, carriages, scooters, and more.

For substitute materials they used wool plush, artificial silk plush, cotton plush, and in 1919, they actually made animals from paper plush made from wood fibers with a backing of cotton.
Given the fragility of this fabric, it is not surprising that paper plush animals are hard to find nowadays.
But fret you not, o collector!
In 2020, Steiff started a new line of animals made from different fabrics called "Teddies for tomorrow" (although it's not just teddies). There's rayon, linen/cotton, alpaca, linen/vegan felt, bamboo, hemp, plush from recycled PET bottles - and paper plush.
One reason are rising energy and material costs which endanger the future of Steiff Schulte (which was taken over by the Steiff Holding in 2009), the other the question of sustainability which should be a topic for every company.

Being mainly a collector of vintage Steiff, this series had gone by me completely until someone told me to look a sweet dark blue bear ... and sometime later at a colorful bear.
They are called After Midnight and Harlekin.
(Marsha, this is for you - it was a (very good) sale and I blame my sister. Again.)
These are no cuddly teddies meant for children, not that I expected them to be. The paper plush feels a bit harder than my towels (I don't like fabric softener) which is interesting to me, and I just think they are very cute.
Harlekin is made after an old Steiff design. I love that his colors look a bit faded as if he were vintage.
Others buy clothes, shoes, cosmetics, accessories, I buy beads and teddies 😉

Sources:
1. Rebekah Kaufmann: Cut from a different cloth - six of Steiff's lesser-known teddy bear fabrics. On: Teddy Bear Times & Friends, September 21,2020
2. The History of the Teddy Bear. On the Steiff website
3. Steiff Schulte: History. On the Steiff Schulte website
4. Sustainability promise. On the Steiff website
5. Susanne Decker: Steiff - die Stoffe. Auf: Steifftiere, ein Stück Kindheit (in German)

Day trip to the Steiff museum

We don't live that far from Giengen/Brenz and as collectors of Steiff we have been there quite a few times over the last 20 years. You don't know Giengen? You have never heard of Steiff?

Don't worry, I'll spare you the company history (although it's very interesting), this is not the place for something you can find elsewhere easily. Let me just say that a Steiff animal really is a friend for life and that the designs are amazingly lifelike, especially the really old ones.

In 2005 the new Steiff Museum opened its doors and that is where we went yesterday. Instead of rambling on I'll let a few of the pictures that I took speak for themselves.

Steiff has always been famous for their mechanical pieces, here "Arabian Nights"

Looking upwards - apes in the trees!

It must be hard to have to "work" for Steiff if you are a polar bear.

A little Steiff garden in the museum's hall

Old pals. Teddy was made from some kind of wood fabric because in wartimes other fabric was rare.

Margarete Steiff greeting people in the museum's hall. Suffering from polio as a child, she had to use a wheelchair all her life.

Baboon baby - always one of my favorites since we first went to the Steiff museum (still the old one then)

Penguin family

Not the tall guy, but the tall bear ;-)

Swimming turtles - the picture of the shells came out too dark :-(

Cool snake slide - who wouldn't want to have something like this at home?

Skiing penguins - the row up there actually moved

Smiling tigers - I wonder what they think

An old penguin with his friend Treff, the bloodhound (one of my favorite Steiff dogs!)

Isn't she sweet?

If you ever get the chance, take a look. The tour starts with the story of Margarete Steiff  and shows her sewing room (not the real one of course), goes on with a teddy telling you the story of Richard, her nephew, who was one of the inventors of the teddy bear (I won't discuss who was the first one, I think some things just happen at the same time in different parts of the world because the time is due), and then follows the story of the lost 3000 teddy bears. Afterwards the door opens to the exhibition with cases of old animals on one and lifesize animals on another floor. They also built a workshop where you can watch how the animals are made and see all the tools which is very interesting.

The only moment yesterday that was a little sad was when we wanted to go for lunch. For years we always ate at the same place, but it's not there anymore. I wish we could have said goodbye.