The (Boat) Bear Necessities

A well-dressed boat bear

If you decide to live on a boat, especially a small boat travelling along a big river, you need the right equipment and suitable clothes for all eventualities.

Under-dressed for a life afloat

A blue and white striped top alone isn't enough, even if you are a bear with fur all over your body.  You need clothes that will keep your fur clean when you are near grease and oil from boat engines, locks and all sorts of other boaty things I didn't understand before joining the crew of Uplander II. 

Luckily for me, Polar can sew.  This is because when she was a human cub, she was much bigger than most other girl cubs and had to make her own clothes - with help from her mum - or wear clothes for boy cubs.  Polar still sews, although this is usually to repair clothes she has worn out or damaged.  She does not approve of wasting anything that can be reused.

My first boat clothes were some dungerees and a hat, made from parts of a pair of Polar's old jeans, which had lots of holes above the knee on the left leg.  Polar isn't sure why it's always the left leg on her jeans that wears out first but she thinks it's something to do with the way she digs her allotment. 

I am going to explain how we made my dungarees shortly, but - and this is very important: if you want to make some matching dungarees for your own bear - or another animal friend - using a grown-up's jeans, you must make sure the grown-up doesn't want to wear them again. 

Polar won't wear jeans with big holes in the knees because the torn fabric would get caught on lock gear and could trip her into the canal.  Also, she has creaky knees and likes to keep them warm.  However, humans who don't have boats or creaky knees don't worry about this and they wear holey jeans because they are fashionable.  Therefore, please be very careful not cut up your mummy or daddy's fashionable holey jeans to make bear clothes, no matter how much you love your bear!

Here are some pictures of me wearing my dungarees.  Don't they look smart!  They are my favourite outfit.  We made most of them from the bottom of the legs of Polar's worst jeans, re-using the original trouser hem.  We chose sections that weren't frayed and cut out two rectangular pieces, long enough to go from my feet up above my tummy and wide enough to go half way round me with enough to spare for seams.  Polar sewed the bottom half of each rectangle into tubes just wide enough to go over my back paws and long enough to reach almost to the top of my legs, then joined what had been the inside leg seams of each tube to the other piece of fabric, at the front and back, leaving a gap at the back for my tail!  Then she turned over the top twice and stitched it down inside, almost invisibly and with no fraying edges visible.

She made the straps by carefully cutting out the trim along the two bigger front pockets and used the small front pocket to make the bib, keeping the little stud on it and matching it with one from another pocket, so they look like fastenings.  My hat is made out of an oval of jeans fabric and a section of the waistband, with another piece for the brim.  Because of this, it has a label inside, which says Long Tall Sally and a number 18.  It has holes for my ears, so I can hear what is going on around me.

Because Polar is a big human, even after she had made me my dungarees and hat, there was plenty of material to make me some overalls too, which I wear when there is work to do on Uplander II's engine.  I don't do the work myself but I like to watch the mechanic from River Canal Rescue, as I learn things that way.  I would quite like to work for them when I grow up. 

My overalls also keep my fur clean when I'm making jam.  They zip up at the front because Polar cut around the zip in her jeans to make the front of my overalls.  The back pockets made very nicely trimmed sleeves.

 

There was even enough spare fabric after that to put big patches across the splits in the legs of her second-worst jeans, which is what she was keeping them for.  There is still some denim left over, so she is now making something for a friend of mine.  I will tell you about him another day.

In my next post about making boat things for bears, I will show you how to turn a 'Bag for Life' into a 'Bag for Life-jacket'!  Before that, I want to tell you more about my journey...