Ellen Borggreve Design

A love for things

I was talking to my dad the other day about how we felt about stuff; the stuff you gather over the years and that might just pile up in your house. I am the kind of person who can't let things pile up and I need to have surfaces clean and tidy in the house. I feel so claustrofobic, when I am surrounded by too much stuff. My dad is different; he is really attached to most of his things and even though he is thinking of reducing the amount of items in the house, he still is really attached to loads of his books, memorabilia and other stuff my parents gathered over the years.
It got me thinking about attachment to ''things''. I try to never get attached to things too much, because I am always afraid I might have to give them up. It is mostly unfounded and if I do loose things, it is most of the time, because I have made my own fears come true. Just the other week I got my new little Latidoll Yellow Vampire Miel in the midst of the turmoil over the sewage. I was thinking that I should help finance this all and immediately put up two of my dolls for sale, including the newly arrived one. I was thinking that if she had just come in, I could not be too attached to her and...they were all just plastic (well, resin actually) ''things''. Boy, was I wrong! I sold one of my girls to a good friend and she loves her to bits, but I miss having her around....Yes...I miss having a bit of resin around, doesn't that sound weird? Then the newly arrived Miel was also sold to a very good friend at the exact time I found out, I had not needed to sell either of them at all. There I was...sobbing over a piece of resin....even worse! In the end I got to keep my Miel, because my friend insisted I kept her. She is such a  sweet person, thanks Debby!!! I felt silly, because I have always had this strict rule not to get attached, but now that I have been talking to my dad, I am wondering if I perhaps am too hard on myself. This opinion is shared by most who know me actually...
Here is the ''thing'' that got me sobbing....don't laugh!!!

And another picture...

She is supposed to be a vampire, but I'd like to think she has a sweet tooth or two. Her only craving is for chocolate hopefully!

Dreamy...

I was just wondering the other day if artists are the kind of people that were always craving for passion. I don't mean that passion you feel when you are in love, but a different kind of passion. One that you can feel when you are working on an exciting new idea, that will make you feel flushed and will make you go on and on for hours in a row. Do artists live the lives they live because they strive to feel like this? I think I do....It makes me search for new techniques, go through the pages of many art books and magazines and it makes me go into museums. Sometimes you spot something that does hit a nerve with you, that makes you feel very much alive. I was so happy to receive three Stampington magazines this week : Artful Blogging, Art Doll Quarterly and Stuffed!.  These magazines have a way of making you feel part of the group, like you are all artists meeting up in a little French café, exchanging ideas and visions. I love that feeling... It does not happen that often that you can exchange ideas with other artists in real life, so I really cherish my moments with these magazines and my internet connections with all kinds of creative people. Even though we don't have the croissants and café au lait on the table and we can't look into eachother's eyes, I still feel like we somehow meet. 
If you don't know the magazines from Stampington yet and would like to learn more, please visit them at www.stampington.com

My pile of Stampington publications on my coffee table... Flipping through these magazines makes me feel the same way like I did when I was a child, staring out of the window at school, dreaming of all the beautiful things that were out there...

Now that I spend a lot of my time indoors and quite a few hours in bed, these magazines are like that window you open to sniff up the fresh air. I feel like creating something entirely new.

Hmmm, 6 random things...

I was tagged by Marlys to mention 6 random things about myself. I have played a game like this before and don't remember what random facts I shared at that time, so time to dive in the blog archives...
Right, I found them here
Now I have to think of 6 new things...
1. I am sort of addicted to Latte Macchiato
2. I am ''allergic'' to bright and bold colours, they make me very stressed
3. I have loved cars ever since I was a little girl
4. I played with toy trains rather than with dolls as a child
5. I am a dreamer
6. Sounds, loud music and the radio make me stressed too :o)

Now I have to tag 6 other people, but I will leave that until tomorrow. This 180 year old artist needs to sleep for a few hours now until she can continue working...grmbl...really, really, really annoying

Wow, a blog award!

I meant to write about this yesterday, but all of a sudden Typepad got stuck and I could not share this news with you that certainly brought a smile to my face!
Ruth Bowman from Flutter-By Bears gave me this award and I am really chuffed about it!
I am just copying and pasting in what I read on Ruth's blog about this award:

This one seems to have originated in Portuguese ; "Proximidade" loosely translates as neighbourhood , or possibly community . The spirit of this award is all about forging friendly links amongst bloggers and highlighting people who post with care and attention , whilst having an active interest in others - or (put more eloquently) "investing in the riches of neighbourhood and community "

Here is the official accompanying text :-

" The authors say that blogs who receive this award are exceedingly charming . This blog invests in proximity in space , time and relationships . These kind bloggers aim to find and be friends .
They are not interested in prizes or self-aggrandisement . Our hope is that when the ribbons of these awards are cut , even more friendships will be propagated . Please give your kind attention to these writers !
Deliver this award to 8 bloggers who will choose 8 more , and include this cleverly written text in to the body of the award . "

Ruth wrote to me that she thought I deserved this award for having had the blog parade on my blog for Christmas and that means a lot to me! I so enjoyed having this parade to promote our art and community and I will do something like this again, just because it really felt so good. That I now got this award is a real bonus :o)

I am supposed to pass this award on to 8 other blogs now...
This is a hard choice, as I like so many blogs and so many display an air of friendship and community, but these are the ones I have chosen:
Brimbin Forest Bears....Lyn is just such a great person and if anyone is a great friend, Lyn is...
All Bear...I know Paula got this award already, but she deserves it with her friendly and cosy corner is this blog world!
Tami Eveslage  I so enjoy the friendly atmosphere of Tami's blog. She is a super talented lady
The Silly Bear...Always a joy to read!
Enchanted Productions....Joyce is so very talented and a wonderful and very kind person on top of that.
Potbelly Arts...Shel is a wonderful friend, a very talented person and very authentic, which I really appreciate!
Mary Myrtle Miniatures...I had to pass this on to Samantha Potter. She is doing such a good job organizing a new fair in the UK. The show will be in its second year in 2009 and Samantha has worked very hard to make this happen and promote artist bears more. On top of that Samantha is super talented and extremely friendly as well!
Matilda Huggington-Beare... Wendy is an amazing artist and she is one of those persons that always thinks about promoting our art. She is as much fun as her creations.

Oh...I do feel bad for the tens of other artists that I would have chosen if I could have. There are so many more wonderful blogs and super friendly artists that deserve receiving this award... I will get in touch with the artists as soon as I can!

Oh my.....

I hope you have not all been thinking that I vanished in thin air again. Boy, life has been hectic. The beginning of the year is always really busy with new advertisements to be designed, accounts to be done, restock on materials, huge administrative jobs and other not too fun stuff, that comes with having your own company. I thought I'd better plan that in the first two weeks of the year and get it over with as quickly as possible. I did and it worked, but it has exhausted me beyond belief. I feel like I am 180 years old. At the doctor's they were very firm with me, now telling me again that my body was putting on the emergency break and that I should start resting. The funny thing is, I feel quite well as long as I just work on the bears, it's the all the other stuff that makes me so tired.
On top of that....what do you think this is?

Have a wild guess? Yes, the drains got blocked when it was minus 10 degrees Celsius! After they were unblocked through this small hole in my driveway, we thought we had been really lucky until it started smelling really bad in the entire house. Even the fridge smelled if you opened it, so we had all drains inspected by camera. Oh horror and shock (and huge panic in my case); all drains had to be replaced as they were torn so badly....aaaaaarrrrrggggghhhhh! That's not what you want to hear at the beginning of your new year, which is supposed to be a really good year (or so I have told myself...hahaha). Anyway, it has kept me rather busy and now the entire garden on the front and the back of the house and the driveway will be dug up. One good thing about this all is that we don't have to worry about that anymore after it has been fixed
It was so cold when they dug up this hole that it looked like we had our own geiser (like they have in Iceland)

I have actually started working in the studio again and will probably not be around on the internet too often for a while, so I can just put all energy I have towards the bears. I hope to finish my orders next week (they have all been sewn up and partially stuffed) and then the work for Hugglets really has to get started. I still have to sleep a few hours in the afternoons, so hopefully that will be over in a month's time. The pain from these shingles goes up and down a bit at the moment. Most of the time it is quite manageable, sometimes it is a bit more of a challenge. I thought I had recovered, but I was a bit too quick as usual....That's just so me. Sometimes I wish I was a bit less me and a bit more careful, but then again....people would miss all the amusement I now provide them with. What stories would there be to tell on birthdays, if I would not be able to tell people how I skated throught the room, because I had used a wrong kind of floor cleaner, that was supposed to get rid of all pet odours? Or uhm...how I was acting silly, dancing through the house and did not see the quite substantial coffee table (or koffer actually)? How I became stuck on the stairs because I wanted to get a table downstairs and could not wait until hubby came home? Yep...all of that because I just am not careful and am always in a hurry. If you think this is a list of a year, I can reveal that it is not. This is a list of 3 weeks....

Done!

It's done, it's finished!!! I have been hard at work on the last pages for the website all through the day and finally....my website is completely restyled! Yayyyyy!
The Awards page was the last one that was in desperate need of some thorough revamping and it did take me a while to come up with something that was different from the gallery pages, yet really ''me''. I hope I succeeded.
Here's a little preview, but again...if you would like to see the end result, please visit my website

Now it is time to start finishing some bears!

Totally revamped!

Yay...I finished most of the work on the website today. It has taken me months of preparations of pictures and making backgrounds in photoshop, but I am so proud of the results! I just need to change one section of the website, but everything else has just been uploaded and the brand-new galleries look so great, even if I say so myself. This website is much more ''me'', mostly because I did all the work myself this time. I am so glad I did it, because wow...did it teach me a lot about Frontpage and Photoshop.
Just a tiny preview of the galleries here, but please visit the website if you have the time and take a look at the all new galleries. I would really like to know what you all think....

A long, long time ago

On the 7th of January 1997 it was a cold winter's day and buyers came to look at our home that was up for sale in the morning. Tica, Caya's mum, was pacing through the living room with a very peculiar look in her eyes and so I knew there would be puppies that day. Just a few hours after the buyers bought our home, the puppies announced themselves and the first black and white puppy was soon in sight. I still thank the Lord to this day that I had watched so many episodes of James Herriott as a child, because the things he did to save calves that were stuck, certainly saved the little male's life! He was so terribly stuck that I could just think that if an actor could do this to a cow, I should be able to this to a dog, right? Out came Calimero. Then Tica thought to herself, that if I had been doing such a splendid job, I should try to get all three puppies out and so she just waited for me to do the trick. End result was a emergency visit to the vet and two beautiful sable girls were born. It would become the easiest litter in history. It was so obvious that they had a laid back dad and they did nothing else than enjoy the warmth, sleep and eat (a lot).

Caya was meant to stay with me all along. I knew it straight away. She had these big eyes and from the beginning she was the one that was never into any kind of trouble. She just matched my personality...
On the right is Caya at 2 weeks old...

Just a few months after she was born I found out about the bear world and all dogs but three were placed in new loving homes. Caya, her dad and granddad stayed with us.
Two days ago the little puppy turned 12....aaaargggghhhh....where did the time go???

It's a good thing she turned 12, because I really needed an excuse to install my new scanner and get some old pictures scanned. This is all from my photography blunder period, so they are not that good. Oh, how I wish I could go back in time with the digital cameras we have nowadays and take all the pictures again...That is just terribly frustrating, because one thing is for sure...I will not breed any more litters in this lifetime. I love puppies, don't get me wrong, but I think that I am not suitable to breed dogs. These days I would not be able to part with them...

 

A proper Dutch winter

It's is turning out to be a proper Dutch winter, the one most Dutch dream about, in which we can skate on lakes and open water, in which we might even get our beloved Elfstedentocht again which last took place when I was a teenager. The Elfstedentocht is just so typically Dutch, that I could not possibly think of anything more Dutch than that. It is a skating tour which passes 11 towns in the north of the country. Needless to say that you need to have had a lot of frost to achieve that and so it is a rare thing to happen these days with the past winters that felt like spring, even to the flowers in the garden.

There are now talks that it might happen this year, how exciting! Why it is so typically Dutch? Well, we have all been brought up with skating, this is a big thing to us. I think it has something to do with our battle against water and of course our mentality which seems to include having to go through all sorts of hardships and act as if that is how it is supposed to be. Why else would doctors in the Netherlands otherwise keep insisting of having women deliver babies without epidurals? Why else would Dutch women bring their children to school on a bicycle when it is raining and cold with one child in a seat on the back and one on the front...I honestly can't say I think I am all too fond of that sort of stuff. I like the comfortable life way too much to be seen on a bike struggling against the wind on a dyke...eeeek...But skating I do understand. It's in my blood. No skating though this year. Shingles mean you are very sensitive to cold and heat alike, so I have to sit at home and watch others skate. Still I have quite a view from my home, don't you think?

And here's proof that there is indeed something that makes Caya trying to break down our fence every time she is outside....This is not her paw print and so she might just be right :o) The way she is going on, you would think a giant puma had entered her territory, but I think it might be a more common kind of creature...one with very warm paws by the way to melt through ice on a day that it is minus 10 degrees Celsius...brrrrr...

Another Year Over, A New One Just Begun

How I love to ponder on what has been and dream about what still is to come...

2008 was an amazing year in which many of my dreams came true, just like that. I did have to overcome some hurdles along the way, but there's no need to relive the not so great moments. What counts is that they left mewith new foundations on which to build.

Shingles in one way has been the greatest gift I could have received. I could finally see clearly where things had gone wrong, where I had taken a long and winding road leading to nowhere and what really makes me happy. Even though it was a bit of a painful lesson, it was one I would not have liked to miss. I now know that I really have to focus on making bears to be happy. It is all too easy to get distracted by the internet, daily house stuff and all kinds of other things these days, but in the end of the day, I need to have made something in order to feel really happy.
Second thing I learned is that I really need to look at all the things that are good in life, things to be grateful for. Having grown up with a mother with Parkinson's Disease does tend to make you feel happy for just being able to walk, talk, create, write, type...just the stuff you would normally take for granted, but which are so very important in order to be yourself.
And the third thing I learned is, that I really don't want to be surrounded by negative stuff. It just drains your energy so much, which is something you can literally feel when you have shingles.

Right...on with the really good stuff that 2008 brought!
I actually made 50 % more bears than the years before that and for that I am really grateful. I don't understand how I did it, but I am sure my best friends can fill you in. They would tell you they have hardly seen me at all :o)
The best thing that happened was of course winning both the TOBY industry's choice award and the TOBY public's choice award for my Marbles and get a nomination for the 2008 Golden Teddy Award for my raccoon Aviva. The fact that I won a TOBY has changed my life, it has meant the world to me that there were more people out there that actually liked what I had made.
Most important to me though is that I feel I have grown in my work. I really think the bears of 2008 are the best I ever made, some of which were really hard to let go off. This fact is important to me, because I need that kind of growth in my work to be able to enjoy it to the fullest.

2009 will be really exciting....I can feel the buzz already. I have loads of new ideas lined up. My tables have been cleared, my studio is spotless, I cleaned out all cabinets, drawers and boxes in the entire house, which always gives me this feeling of a fresh new start and so I am raring to go. I found it very hard to not sit in my studio the last few days.
A few of the plans include the workshop I'll be teaching at the Teddy Bear Artist Event in Stratford Upon Avon. This is another dream come true for me and I am taking bookings for this now...
I'll be present at two more fairs in the UK, both organized by Hugglets I had thought of going to less fairs, but now that I can make a bit more bears and have found a way to not completely exhaust myself whilst travelling, I think I might be able to handle this. Let's wait and see...
Monday will be my first day back in the studio (finally...it feels like I have been away from it for an eternity...) and I can't wait to get going again!

One of my New Year's reolutions is to become organized with Paula Carter as a shining example. She also beat me to it when creating a mosaic with her 2008 bears :o)

Last but not least I would really like to thank all my collectors, colleagues and friends who have made it possible for me to live the life of a designer/artist. Thanks for the inspiration, the enthusiasm, the votes of confidence, the support and the friendships, they mean more to me than I will ever be able to express.
I hope you will all join me in my ride through 2009...whoosh....buckle up...here we go!
Happy New Year!!!!