Vintage Cherished Teddies Velvet Sachet Bear – Choose Daisy or Feather Hat, Friends Are The Spice Of Life, Enesco Hillman Resin 2001

These aren't figurines in the usual sense. Only the head, hat and bow are resin — the body is a velvet drawstring sachet, once filled with scented spice and meant to live among the linens, perfuming a drawer. Cherished Teddies made few of them, and fewer survive: sachets were consumables, used until the scent faded and then thrown away, and the paper tags that name them were the first thing lost.

Mint with Daisy Hat still has hers, in period script: "Friends Are The Spice Of Life" — a nicely doubled joke, since spice was literally what she was stuffed with. The line itself is older than the bear by two centuries: William Cowper wrote "Variety's the very spice of life" in 1785. She wears a white wide-brimmed hat sprigged in green with a cluster of yellow daisies, a green bow at her ruffled collar, and her velvet is clean and unmarked.

Peach with Feather Hat lost her tag somewhere along the way — honestly noted — but kept something rarer: a full white feather standing in her hatband, intact after twenty-odd years, where most snapped or shed long ago. It also makes her the taller of the two: 3.5 inches to the feather tip, against the mint bear's 2.5.

Both carry the little metal plate stitched to the back: ©2001 Priscilla Hillman, Licensee Enesco Group, Inc. — cloth-bodied pieces got metal plates rather than printed bases, which is why they carry no item number and slip through most collector catalogues entirely.

The original scent is long gone, as it always is; a drop of oil or a spoon of dried lavender through the drawstring brings them back to work, should you want them working.

Choose one at checkout — or take them both, since they were made as sisters.