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A really great present to get for your own child or a relative’s is a teddy bear that you’ve made yourself. Basic teddies are actually surprisingly easy to make, but you’re free to put as little or as much effort in as you want. If you spend a long time on it, you can make a teddy to rival anything put out by the big teddy manufacturers.

Although there are many fabrics and methods you can use to make a teddy, probably the best is knitting with yarn. It is easy to find yarn in a very good teddy-like shade of brown, and teddy knitting patterns are readily available all over the Internet – search for ‘teddy knitting’ to find whole sites devoted to knitting teddies and other soft animal toys.

Once you have the pattern, you need to find a good stuffing for the teddy. Cotton wool is an easy to find, cheap and soft material, but you can stuff a teddy with almost anything you want. Avoid man-made materials and stick to the natural stuff and you shouldn’t go far wrong.

When it comes to making the eyes and the nose, plastic buttons will do, but the best material to use is glass beads. Two black glass beads will give your teddy beautiful, friendly eyes, and they don’t even cost all that much from most craft stores.

To finish the teddy off, you can tie a silk bow around its body or its hair, to make it look like a really pretty present. Fix it in place with a few threads so it can’t come untied, and it can become a permanent feature of the teddy.

One warning, though: making teddies can be very addictive! Once you’ve made your first one, it’s tempting to just keep on going. But then, there’s nothing wrong with that, is there?

John Gibb is the owner of