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! 😂

Guarding the woods

When I first saw this picture, I imagined myself going out of the house early in the morning to make my way to the train station, still half asleep.

There's a small street and a square between a school and its gymnasium I had to walk across every workday. They have about ten streetlights and those lights were on the blink sometimes, quite literally, they would start blinking, mostly just one or two which was okay, but once they went one after the other day by day until they were all blinking in some kind of silent code. Honestly, at 5 a.m. I'm getting weird ideas easily and it really was a weird sensation. That day, however, I finally remembered to report it online and the next day they were fixed.
Of course it hadn't helped that the little park next to it produced some even stranger shadows than usual thanks to it. I was lucky the lady, who took her Great Dane there without a leash for a while, wasn't there at the time. Can you say Hound of the Baskervilles? It really made me jump the first time I saw that dog coming out of the dark.

And now imagine what coming across something like this creepy "creature" unexpectedly could have done to my tired brain. I can see myself screaming and running for the hills, only I can't run and there are no hills there.

Nevertheless, I love that picture and think it's sad that, according to the web, this streetlamp in Warsaw has since lost its hair as the company on whose property it is standing deemed it as dangerous for pedestrians.

The picture has been on the web for a while and keeps turning up. The last time a friend of mine shared it, I thought that I would really like to capture it in some way. In the past, I would have tried to bead loom it, but I would probably not have been able to do the vines the way I wanted to. Bead embroidery was another possibility, but in the end hand embroidery felt like the best choice to me.

At the beginning, the plan was to more or less copy part of the picture on a rather small frame as a sample to see how long it would take and if a bigger version made sense. I did the outlines first and then the flowing vines around the body and the head, and that's when I felt the need to put at least a bit of my own touch on it. Making more hair turned it into a different kind of creature to me.
From there on it should have been pretty clear that this would not stay a sample because next were hours of filling up the outlines with loads of small stitches going in all directions for some texture.

I had left the face until last. Obviously I didn't want to change anything about the glow, after all this makes for the amazing effect. Again I contemplated different options, silver-lined beads, other beads, even sequins cut in shape, all because I wasn't confident I would be able to achieve the glowing effect with embroidery as I haven't practiced shading a lot yet.
In the end the playchild inside me that likes to try out things convinced me to give it a go after all. I picked six colors from my floss, winged it and was happier with it than expected.

Somehow the creature started to change in my mind and the post on the left looked wrong to me, instead I began seeing trees. My favorite trees have always been birches, we had some in the neighborhood when I was a child and they were so pretty.
I couldn't stop myself and added one tree after the other, and then I really didn't have an excuse not to fill up what little was left of the background. Well, and then the scene called for snowfall.

When I showed my friend the first bad picture of the finished piece, she said she loved "her" with a question mark next to "her". I replied I wasn't even sure myself about "she" or "he" yet and that I felt there was a story in this that unfortunately I'm not good enough to write.
Small details of other stories I knew kept going through my head when I was working on this, for example my favorite Christmas story from an anthology I got as a child. It plays in the woods and I love it so much that one year I actually typed it up to copy it (typewriter, that gives you an idea how long ago that was) and give it to my friends.
Those bits didn't add up to a story for my guardian yet - because that's the only thing I'm sure of, that this is a Guardian of the Woods from ancient times and a spiritual world.
I'm not going to push it, maybe she or he will tell me their story eventually even if I won't be able to put it in words, but just see it before my mind's eye. Maybe I'll see something in one of my crazy dreams.

Anyway, I'm really happy with my new friend.
There's not going to be a bigger one, not only because it would probably take me forever, but also because the story can't be repeated.
I ordered a simple frame for it now and can't wait to get to get it on my wall (as far away from dem Dekan as possible!).
I couldn't resist showing it to you already, though.

The Box

A few months ago a co-worker brought me a wooden box asking if I would like to have it. I don't know if it used to belong to a library, but it was a little battered, had a slightly rusty latch, and still all I thought was that maybe some day I would pick up bead embroidery, so I said yes.
Since then the box had been standing around openly in my hallway, so I was reminded of it every time I walked by. I guess that was the reason why I had bought the Stiff Stuff (a backing for bead embroidery) I recently found in a box on my stash drawers and also bunch of dichroic glass cabochons. I honestly don't remember.

So I gave this a try. First I did all the cabs, and from there I just winged it, determined to decimate my stash of bugles and seed beads, and after I improvised the "tentacles", I remembered having some shell pearls, so I threw them into the mix as well.
Had I decided on a background beforehand, I would probably have used more bright colors for the tentacles. I simply hadn't thought about how many seed beads I would need for it, and the only colors that I had in bigger amounts were black and gunmetal - I had already used both black and gunmetal bugles in the tentacles, so that was not a choice - and my beloved gunmetal AB. I'm getting withdrawal symptoms if I don't have enough seed beads and Delicas in that color in the house, it was the first one I fell in love with, and I love using the beads for night skies.
The background was good practice for embroidering curves.

When I had finished the piece which took me so many hours, I had another look at the box. The color of the wood seemed all wrong now. What now? A friend of mine advised me to consider chalk paint.
I had a look around and then ordered some because it sounded easy enough for even me to use. When it arrived, I was a little surprised because I had expected a darker color from the picture, but so what?
I gave the box a light sanding and then a few coats of paint, allowing each one to dry in between. The advantage of chalk paint is that it dries rather quickly (an advantage that really sold the idea to me ;-)). Afterwards I scrubbed it just lightly with the rough side of a kitchen sponge because I didn't want to go for the full shabby chic look, I just wanted the color not looking so uniform and boring.

I'm not a painter, and this is not perfect, but I didn't aim for perfection. I would have had to do a lot more with the box to make it perfect. It has dents here and there, there's the latch that was hesitant to lose all of its rust while I was hesitant to look for a new latch to put on, and so my brush strokes are not even, either. That rather fits me, though.

Next I glued on the embroidered piece. There we go. Or not.
I wasn't completely happy with the latch, so I decided to try painting part of it and randomly adding some beads. So far none has fallen off, but I don't think I'll let Gundel too close!
I didn't seal the paint because I don't intend to bring water near it, either (chalk paint is water-based). Now all I have to do is glue in a bead mat because the inside looks a little battered as well.
Of course I don't have an idea what to use the box for yet ... what would you do with it?

Oldies but Goodies - Wood

We all know that jewelry has been around for thousands of years. In the early days before gems and metals humans used what they could find, plants, feathers, shells, bone, stones - and wood.
None of these materials has disappeared from today's jewelry.
This week's Jewelry Artisans Community Oldies but Goodies Challenge was about wood, treated or untreated, painted or in its original color.
Do you like wooden jewelry? Tell us about it!

1 and 7 Jewelry Art by Dawn
2 and 3 Cat's Wire
4 and 6 Violetmoon's Corner
5 MC Stoneworks