Let's Puppet!

In addition to changing the worLd, last night there was some puppet stuff going on.

I haven't blogged about it yet, because I hate saying "Here's something that might happen" and then it never happens, and also, I just didn't feel like writing about it until there was a finished product to display. Sometimes I'm like that.


So there's a pic of the puppet I built.

My friend Marcus and I have been talking about doing some puppet-related improv stuff for a while now, and since this is another year of yes, it actually happened. Good for us! He's actually a wunderkind at puppet-building. His puppet has hair and kickass eyeballs and rods and hands with fingers. Check it out!


Seriously, he has mad skillz.

I haven't built a puppet out of felt 'n' foam in many, many, many years (Cakey was built by Erika Kern), so my own skillz were pretty rusty.

Although I had a pattern, I quickly eschewed it and took a more intuitive approach. As a learning experience, pretty good! But as a finished product, meh. I don't like the felt eyes, but haven't had a chance to go to a thrift store, buy a cheap stuffed animal, and remove its eyes a la the Corinthian (Sarah has requested I don't leave the corpses lying around the apartment, as that would freak her out). I should've done the insides of the mouth before I did the skin, gotta remember to sew things and then turn them inside out, and one day I'll have to make a proper nose. Also, he wears a hat because shaping the head is hard.

But we had our first performance as The Puppet Regime last night, and it was pretty fun, and there'll be more. I have to build another puppet, I'm sure, since I'm not terribly satisfied with this one.

And it's really more of getting over my fear of making them than anything else. Like, I built this in the space of an afternoon or two. It's just a few simple steps, really, but I dragged them out over the course of months (months!) because I hate sucking and was afraid to fail. Each step was full of "Crap, I don't know what I'm doing. I hate my life!" when I should've just shut up and enjoyed the cement fumes.

Beh. So next time I might take pictures of the process. Not that I want people to learn from me, it'll mostly be a document of How to Blunder Along While Building a Puppet, but it'll be something for the ages.