Owl in Spotlight new puppets

Greetings my friends!

I've had my head down and butt up sewing my Cinderella fingers to the bone for the upcoming show for Halloween. But I wanted to share a scene with you!

This is our heroine, Dort, stumbling across a scene from the Salem Witch Trials.

These guys are some of my current favourites. I love the flames and the pastor's bible.

Of course, often my favourites are whichever I've a) just made or b) my eye has just fallen on.

You can see a few more of the felt guys at our Flickr account.

I'm having a ball making them. Firstly I do a bit of research and find a spooky or halloween scene that I want to build, and then I set about creating it. It's been a really interesting process, unlike all other shows we've worked on, this time I'm making a bunch of guys and then I thrust them at Robert Reid (the other half of Terrible Comfort) and then he gets to weave them all together into a script. Usually the script comes first. It's be really exciting to see how it works from the images first this time!

Big fan of this show... We've had Peter Houghton in to pre-record all the voices and really, listening to him tell the story was a wonderful experience, just like having your dad tell you a bit of a spooky bedtime story.

I love my life.

Fringe Fringe Fringe

Our Fringe show Everything Will Be Ok is going really well. We're playing to extremely appreciative audiences, they hang around afterwards and ask lots of questions, about the ideas behind it, about the puppetry involved, about how long it took to build, all sorts of things. They tell us that it's absorbing and magical, which is what we were going for. It's always so wonderful when things work out the way you'd planned. If you're in Melbourne any time during the next week, come along! 9:15 at 45 Downstairs (little Collin St, Melbourne) Weds to Sat next week or 7:15 tonight.

Here is a photo of one of the scenes, where Debbie is talking to Ayn Rand and Jose Arguelleus.

A couple more shots of the show can be found on Flickr here.

The opening for the exhibition I've curated for Fringe, Echo's Lost was also beautiful, a number of people braved the rain and the cold to stand under Circa's awning to watch the unveiling. I don't want to post complete photos, I don't want to spoil the surprise, but I thought I might give you a taste of the show.

(From left to right, Sayraphim Lothian (half out of shot),
Penny Neil (back) and Angelica East (front)

The artists involved are

SaraMae Belle Page, Allira Cornell, Angelica East, Claire Falkingham, Vanessa Heaton, Soncha Iacono, Sayraphim Lothian, Rebecca Miller, Penny Neil, Ilona Nelson, Roslyn Quin and Beth Robinson

So come along and see some beautiful art. The front window of Circa Vintage Store, 102 Gertrude St, Fitzroy.

And over at Miss Pen Pen's blog, she's posted about a wonderful book called Yarnbombing: The Art of Crochet and Knit Graffiti by Mandy Moore and Leanne Prain, which features photos of the Doiley tree outside her shop, Cottage Industrys, on Gertrude St. It looks like an awesome book and I'm heading out to get a copy this week.

If in Melbourne, you can pick up your own copy from Artisan Books on, you guessed it, Gertrude St across from Dantes (and you can check out Echo's Lost at the same time :) otherwise you can get it from Amazon here.

tutorial - making felt finger puppets of well known people

This one is so simple and quick, which is the way I like 'em. All you need is some suitable coloured felt and some thread and scissors.

This time the brief was a finger puppet of our own Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, but you can use this for anyone at all. To make a finger puppet of someone, or indeed a doll or anything else, really you want the boiled down, essence of that person. You don't want to have to spend a year adding hundreds of the tiniest details to convey the person when you could do it with a couple of stitches in a line.

So to find a simple image that's recognisable as your chosen celebrity, the easiest way is to find a professional who's already done it for you. Political cartoons in newspapers, for example, are perfect for any politician, a quick google search of "Kevin Rudd Cartoon" brings up heaps of examples. Spend a little time looking over them, you want a simple, not really detailed drawing that perfectly captures your celeb. If you don't recognise the person in the drawing, don't use it.

For Kev, I'm going to use this image:

It's by Mark Knight from the Herald Sun, and it comes from here.

My next suggestion is to redraw the face for yourself. Even if you have poor drawing skills (like me), a quick drawing of it will help you understand the shapes you're about to create. I copied the shape of the head, and then drew the hair over the top of that. Don't worry if it's not Van Gogh, no one's gunna see it (you know, unless you put it on your blog :)

Even though Mr Knight's cartoon is a simplified version of our Kev, I decided to simplify it further. Really all that's needed to suggest Kev is the facial shape, the blonde styled hair and the glasses. A suit will help suggest him further, but that comes a bit later on in the process.

So I've cut out his face shape in a pale pink felt, and then copied the hair shape in yellow. Then I'll stitch the hair to the head in tiny yellow stitches.

Next is the glasses. I liked the idea of the fringe falling over the glasses rim, so I stitched it thus.

Eyeballs are next, a couple of tiny bright blue stitches is all you need. And that's it for the face. Now all you need is the body. You can use a finger sized tube of felt, or for this project I wanted him on a glove. The suit is a blue rectangle of felt with the corners snipped off and hot glued down and the tie is two red triangles.

Simple!

(The clever ones among you will notice that this finished Kev is a different version than the example one in the tute, please don't send me emails about it! It's because there were quite a number of Kevs made and this was just the one I happened to photographed when finished. You get all get a gold star each!)

Ah, time flies when you're busy as heck

Oh my god. So the second week of uni has wizzed past, and I haven't posted in my blog for 7 days! I think that's probably a record since I started... I have been crafting alongside the study and stress, but again it's for the play so I can't show you finished projects.

How about a few teasers?

Materials: ink, cardboard, felt, thread.


Materials: cotton fat quarters, thread, willow ball

This is part of my Big West Festival entry, 140cm long piece of knitting. It goes from grey/green colour, through this beautiful rust, some green and some red patchs up to blue and white at the top for the sky. It's an abstract tree, which is fitting since it will be stitched to a real tree somewhere in the Western suburbs. After the festival I've been assured that there is a plan for all the knitting contrubuted, which makes me happy because there's a lot of work and care gone into them all and I'd hate for them to be just chucked out of shoved into a cupboard in an office somewhere never to see the light of day again.

And this one
finger puppets are such fun to make. Especially when it's for a play so you can hot glue them together rather than stitch, which would take SO much longer...

I can't wait for all the props to be done so we can photograph them scene after scene and I can share with you some of my favs!

Tutorial - Real Hands for puppets and puppet suits

This is a really simple tute, which as you know, is always my favourite kind.

When you're building a puppet and you need it to be able to actually use it's hands, then one way to do it is to create what is referred to as "real hands", which is basically a big glove attached to the puppet which the puppeteer wears and then can use their own hands for what ever is needed. Like Rolfe, the piano playing dog from the muppets, used the puppeteer's own hands to tinkle on the ivories.

But you'll have to forgive the photos, they were all taken on my phone.

You'll need:
material for the surface (usually referred to as 'skin' (well, by me))
a piece of felt big enough for the hand/arm
a piece of scrap material, again big enough for the hand/arm you're making
quilting batting


Step one:
Firstly, you need to make a pattern. You need to know if you're making the hand for an adult or a child, this is important in the fitting! For this dragon puppet, the puppeter is a teenage girl, but it's ok for it to be wrinkly, so I used my hand as a pattern.

So grab the scrap piece of material and lay it out on the table, trace around your hand and arm, remembering to leave a couple of centimetres or about an inch as a hem allowance. Most puppets, like most cartoon characters, only have 3 fingers and a thumb, which are usually fatter and stumpier than a normal human hand. My theory on this is because it's easier to make/sew/draw/animate than the thin long fingers that people have. But a) I have no proof, and b) I have digressed. This dragon only needed two fingers and a thumb, so this is what I traced.

Then cut it out.

Step two:

Place the pattern on the felt, pin it down and cut it out. Then cut out a quilt batting hand, and fold the skin in half, right side in and cut out two skin hands.

Easy!

Step three:

Place the hands in the following order
SKIN
SKIN (place the right sides of the skins together
BATTING
FELT

and sew around the edge. Then turn inside out. Slide your hand in and wave it around, pretending you're the dragon/animal/monster/puppet.


Let me explain the felt. When the puppeteer slides their hand into the Real Hand Glove, the last thing they want to have next to their own skin is the batting. So the felt is there to protect the human skin from the batting. You only need one layer of felt, however, because the other side will be the inside of the puppet skin. Phew!

Then do the same again, but ensure you use the other side of the pattern. That means that both hands will be the mirror opposite of each other. Look to your own hands to compare!

And that's it! A rocking pair of puppet gloves so you can pick up cups, write letters and play musical instruments through the puppet.

Easy!

Phew! What a lot of things to cram into such a short time

Oh, there has been much art, much business and a internet connection MIA. Damn technology!

On the weekend, I worked on a short shoot of a showreel of a film written by local guys. Well, Jude and a friend of his. It was great to work on a professional shoot but stacked full of mates. It's set in an office, but one where weird and strange things go on. We shot it in the office where my studio is housed, and it was fun running around dressing the set with subtle and not so subtle weirdness. No photos to show, the day was too jam packed with action, but I had a ball. It was one of the best organised and smoothest run film shoots I've ever worked on, plus like I said, about half of the actors and crew were people I knew, so it was a good day. But like every shoot, it went for 11 hours and I stood up the whole time, bar the half hour for (homecooked!) lunch.

Next, I saw this callout the other day:

Exhibition at City Library.

April 2 - April 28
Blank Canvas
An exhibition by...You!

City Library invites you to 'make your mark' on our gallery wall. Draw, sketch, or write (poems, stories, observations on life etc) and hand your completed creation back to the Information desk to be 'hung' in the gallery. Please ask at the Information desk for A3 paper and art materials.

'Closing' Night Thursday 23 April, 6pm - 7pm
The Gallery @ City Library

(from Fizit's Livejournal)

I was really interested in that as an idea. I was right in the middle of reading Knit Art, by Ferne Geller Cone, a book from the 70s exhorting the joys of freeform knitting as artworks. I was fascinated by it, and itching to try it. So Blank Canvas came along jsut at the right time!

I've recently come into quite a pile of wool and half finished projects, so I grabbed a bag of interestingly textured balls of wool and started knitting.

This is the end product. It's called Abstract Experiment, and it is exactly that. Fascinating process to go through, knitted all in garter stitch, utalising the short row technique. It also incorporates a number of small pre-knitted pieces I found in the bag. I am the first to acknowledge that it's not the prettiest thing I've ever made, but it wasn't created with an asthetic in mind. It was knitted to try a technique out.


It's not a tumor! I was really happy with it.

The other piece I made for the show was something I'd been thinking about for a while, but like everything, I was waiting until the good idea had somewhere to go. I prefer to make things for a specific goal, rather than just randomly knit things.

I present to you KNITTYSCAPE

I love it :) I like all the tails of the yarn just hanging, and it's hung via the needles it was knitted on. This again is just garter stitch, this time utalising Instarta. I didn't have time to steam it flat, but I figured it added a little to the 'just finished' asthetic it has going on.

And just to finish off the news, here is the latest photo of the Mid sized Dragon:


I love the happy expression on his face. But can I just say, OH MY GOD I HATE sewing slippery crushed panne velvet! Ohhh, it makes for much, much frustration. It wasn't my idea, I'd much rather be using fake fur (which hides seams and little hiccups beautifully) or anything that isn't slippery, but I'm matching a costume that's already been made, so I have to go with their design choices. But again, I reiterate, BOO!!!

electrical faults aside, we got a family going on!

Yesterday I spent in the studio still working on the dragons. I bought a glue gun a week ago from a high end craft store that shall remain nameless as my previous glue gun, bought sensibly from a hardware store, had been suddenly called to Majorca to attend a family situation. Or at least, that's what the note it let told me.

So I had to buy another one, and since I was nowhere near a hardware store, I bought one from a craft store. A little nervously, I have to admit.

It's been really crappy. It's hard to work with, doesnt heat up well, which is pretty important in a hot glue gun, you'd have to agree, and generally has been a pain in the arse.

Yesterday, about halfway through the day, I plugged it in and turned it on with a sigh. About five minutes later, there was a flash, a pop and a wisp of smoke, and thus the glue gun went to heaven on little angel wings. (AHAHAH... what a great image! Now I'm considering fishing it out of the bin and doing exactly that to it :)

Because I'm a curious sort of girl, when it had cooled down, I unscrewed it to see what had gone on. It was exactly what I figured had happened. ..

Glue and circuitry boards should not mix... Notice the charring around the spiral of wire? That was all through the gun.

It also knocked out the power points in my studio and although the manager of the building and I spent the next 20 minutes going around to various fuse boxes, we couldnt find the one that had blown.

I'm now running anything electrical through a extension cord from the kitchen. Sighs. I was once told that you know you're having an adventure when you'd rather be home in bed.

So I continued the best I could without a glue gun, sewing skin for bodies and heads, stitching in the arms ect. I also decided that the little guy I had created was too small, so I started on making another, bigger Lil Dragon.

But eventually I got to a point where I ran out of silver thread, then ran out of red thread and decided it was best to go home.
Foreground is the half made Lil Dragon, being hugged by the Mid Dragon (sans facial features, because you need a hot glue gun for that) and at the back you can see the original Big dragon head that came as part of the costume. Of course, it doesnt fit the Big Dragon's head (the dragon head is much wider than a human or polystyrene one) so I have to make one of those too.

Those jobs that always seem simple but then spiral out bigger and bigger? I shall hearby refer to those as galaxy jobs and I think it's fair to say that they always make me sigh

Good things come in threes

So I've been commissioned to design and make a dragon puppet in three sizes - bigger than a teenager, 60cms and small stuffed toy.

After much discussion we decided that we'd go with a costume for the big dragon, a muppet-like puppet for the mid dragon and about 30cms for the stuffed toy.

There's a meme out there of photographing your studio space. So I figured today'd be an excellent opportunity for that. My studio is in a building about 3 suburbs from where I live, so when I'm knitting or making little things, I do it at home. My bedroom is filled with material stashed in every nook and cranny, and crates of wool stashed around the house. But for big things, I trot off to the studio...

On the right you can see the dragon costume. It came without hands, feet or a face, so I have to build those. The big gray shape on the left is the mid dragon's body. On the table at the back is a Grim Reaper, one of two dolls left in my care from Totem... One of them are being picked up today, the other I've still not heard from the artist. Under the table at the back are two tool boxes of varying sizes, and the box under the table on the right is actually a knitting machine that I bought last year and still haven't had time to get out and attempt something.


The dragon needed to be cute. They wanted it with a face like a My Little Pony. Since I didn't have a good grasp on the ins and outs of how a MLP is built, I went and bought one. The drawing was done before I had acquired the rosy equine.

Here is the Mid Dragon and the little one. Note the holes in the Mid Dragon's chest, that's for it's arms. They were all keen on little T Rex type arms.


Family shot! The one on the left is the Mid Dragon. It's hard to tell from this angle, but the Big Dragon is indeed bigger than the Mid one. Which makes sense really.

Where The Wild Things Are

This movie was filmed in Melbourne, a couple of years ago now, and I was lucky enough to work on it. I learnt a lot about monsters, puppets, foam and contact adhesive, knowledge I still use today. In fact I'm currently building 3 dragon puppets, or indeed, 1 dragon puppet in 3 different sizes and as I cut, shaped, glued and snipped yesterday, I reflected on just how much of the stuff I was doing I'd learnt while working on the Wild Things.

The monsters, if you don't already know, are giant puppet suits that the actors wore, and I was one of three Refurb (refurbishment) techs on the film. Each day the monsters crashed through the bush, rolled down hills, waded into water or beat eachother up, so each night, the standbys on set sent home the monsters who had been damaged by the day's work where we would fix them up, put bandaids on their cuts and scrapes and send them back to set.

There was a huge amount secrecy around the monsters, so they were always carried around in these giant black body bags (it took two people to carry each one), so it was a little like a monster morgue when we got them off the truck each night. The monster suits themselves did up with ties and press studs up the belly and chest, so once you got them out of the body bags, you undid all the fastenings and the chest would open wide like cathedral doors. Often you'd have to lean right into them to fix whatever was broken. So it went from Monster Morgue to Alien Autopsy very quickly.

It was an amazing job and I loved it. The book was my favourite as a kid, and the monsters were created and built by the Jim Henson Workshop, who were responsible for (amongst others) Labrynith, which was my favourite film as a kid. Most of the time we were in the workshop, but occasionally we were sent on set to fix the guys up, and I tell you, watching monsters crash through the bush live in their natural enviroment was one of the best sights I have ever, ever seen. Plus, getting hugged by stuntmen and actors in huge monster suits is one of the most awesome things I've ever been hugged by.

So anyway, this whole thing has been sparked by the fact that the trailer has jsut been released! you have to see it, it's incredible! And I get inflated chests of pride when I see a scene on the trailer that I stood and watched being filmed or watched stuntmen practise over and over before it was shot. Working on this film was really one of the highlights of my career and I'm over the moon to say that it looks as wonderful as I knew it would.

Props!

In the next week there's going to be a Surprise Piggy tutorial and a cloth doll tute (I haven't thought of a funky name for her yet) and I'm really looking forward to sharing those with you!

But until then, I figured I'd share some photos from the play I designed that's just finished, This Is Set In The Future at La Mama. There was heaps of good feedback for it, and I was pretty happy with it all up. This was what the Bedazzler was for, as well as the Confusion Fish. But here are some photos of some of the things I made in all their glory!

Joshua Cameron and his bedazzled DISCO SLUT knickers

Joshua Cameron, Rachel Barring and the Confusion Fish


Something I haven't mentioned yet on the blog, the Turkey Baby puppet. It waves it's wings gently if you watch closely. Erm, not in this photo of course, but when Rachel was cradling it.


Rachel and the Turkey Baby.

Nicely enough, I heard one audience member remark as she left "That headless naked turkey really freaked me the hell out" Shucks. It's so nice when something you make connects with the audience! I used to think puppets were in a realm of their own, you know, only something that a Henson Workshop employee could make. But puppets are just craft. The Turkey Baby is made up of dowel rods, shaped foam, loads of hot glue, some terry toweling for skin and then airbrushed with pink ink. Ok, well, the air brushing takes some special equipment, an air brush and air compressor (love you ebay!) but everything else is simple craft supplies anyone can get. And the best place for foam is the off cuts bin at your local friendly foam store.

And, indecently, if you're looking for books on how to make foam hand and rod puppets (think the Muppets) you cannot go past The Foam Book : An Easy Guide to Building Polyfoam Puppets
by Donald Devet and Drew Allison it was and continues to be extraordinarily useful. You can buy it off Amazon, and if I could find a simple way to link to the page I would. Damn uppity Amazon!

Stay tuned for more craft...

tutorial - felt Confusion Fish mobile

These fish were created as rod puppets for a theatre show I am designing, they float around a character's head and confuse her. Thus, they are referred to as Confusion Fish (and a Confusion Blue Ringed Octopus)

This tutorial is for the fish alone, I'll be posting another one for the Confusion Octopus as soon as I can photograph it's pattern.

Firstly, the fish. You'll need:
2 felt squares of complimenting colours (around a4 sized) for each fish
needle and thread of the same colour
stuffing
sissors.

Step one: Download the fish pattern here and print it out A4 sized.

Step two: cut out the pattern and place it on the different pieces of felt. Remember you'll need 2 of every shape.The HEAD, BODY 2, TAIL, and FIN are all from the Main Colour (in this example, it's Dark Blue) and the BODY 1, BODY 3 and EYE are out of the Secondary Colour (Light Blue)

Step three: this is the weird part. We sew this fish from the tail up. So grab the TAIL and the BODY 3 parts. Place the two parts together with wavy edge of BODY3 rests just past where the tail thins to become the body.
(Check out the example photo) Working on the wrong side of the fish, stitch the straight edge of the top of BODY3 to the TAIL. The clever thing about this pattern is that all the stitching in the body itself is hidden by the next overlapping piece.

Continue with BODY2 and BODY1 as in the photo
At the moment it will look a little flimsy, but don't worry about it, everything will be fine.

Stitch the other side of the body the same way. If you're keen, you can keep checking it against the first body to ensure it all matches up. I'm not that keen ;)

Step four: Now here is the clever bit. Place the HEADs in the correct place on the newly sewn fish body, and place them together, right sides in. Stitch around the entire thing, leaving a gap of around 7cm (2 1/2") at the belly to enable you to turn it right side out.

Step five: turn Confusion Fish right side out. Bet you didn't see that coming!

Step six: Stuff the Fish firmly, then stitch the gap closed.

Step seven: lift the edge of the head and stitch the fin under the flap (see example pic above) and stitch on eye.

And that's it. You're the proud creator and owner of a Confusion Fish.

Next, the Octopus. You'll need:
2 felt squares of complimenting colours (around a4 sized) I've gone with green here.
needle and thread of the same colour
scraps of light blue and dark blue felt
stuffing
scissors

Step one: Download the octopus pattern here and print it out A4 sized.

Step two: Cut 2 Dark Green BODIES, 2 Dark Green EYES and 2 Light Green HEADs. Each leg you make needs 1 Dark Green LEG, 1 Light green LEG, 3 Dark Blue RING1's and 3 Light Blue RING2's.

Step three: Place the HEADs in the correct place on the BODIES,and stitch around the entire thing, leaving the bottom entirly unsewn.

Step four: Turn right side out and stuff firmly.

Step five:Place a RING2 on top of a RING1 which you then place on a Light Green LEG and stitch around the edge of the RING2. Repeat twice more os the Light Green leg has 3 rings on it as per photo
You don't need to stitch around RING1, stitching RING2 is enough.

Step six: Place the Light Green LEG with the rings down on top of the Dark Green LEG (right sides in) and stitch around the whole thing, leaving the top open.

Step seven: turn right side out and stuff. Make as many legs as you need to fit into the bottom of the Octopus, mine called for 5.

Step eight: Place all the legs into the bottom of the 'Pus and stitch them all firmly in.

Step nine: Stitch eyes on

And that's it.
Make a couple of Fish and one 'Pus and sew them with a long thread to a piece of dowel, and you have a Confusion Fish mobile for a small child. Sew them to individual dowel rods painted black and you have Confusion Fish rod puppets.

Simple, colourful and fun