#rwcmd2020

In the original R&D performance I used a plastic laundry basket to hold the sacks that hang on the washing line, however, this clearly stuck out as not part of the woody/autumnal colours of the set and so I looked for a laundry basket that would fit with the same textures and colours of the set. Lots of the baskets made form natural materials were very expensive and so I decided to have a go at making a basket from leftover willow. 

I started by doing some research on how to weave baskets using willow and by soaking a big bundle of willow over night. 

I followed a combination of youtubve videos and webpages to make this large basket. 

I wove the base until it seemed big enough, using a simple over and under style weave. The willow, despite being well soaked, was brittle and snapped more often than it would have done with fresh willow. I was also told that willow soaked more than once can become more brittle when its soaked a second time and I think that might have happened here. 

I kept replacing rods when they broke so the weave is a little patchy and lumpy, but i’m surprised at how strong the base turned out. 

Once the base was big enough, I added the forks that help to create the side of the basket and started to weave willow up the sides using the same tecniques as the base. 

Once I’d gotten the hang of it the sides quickly built up. 

When the sides were tall enough I finished the top with a weave that meant all the remaining willow rods were tucked in and gave a strong rim. 

Finally I added handles and finished the basket by trimming and tucking in any rod that were poking out. 

I am really pleased with the final product and surprised at how strong it feels considering the age of the willow and my inexperience as a basket maker! I think it works really well with the rest of the set colours and is a great container for the puppets when everything is being moved around. 

Below are photos from the final rehearsal and filming! 

This Autumn term of my MA in Performance Design I have been given the task of designing and performing a ‘Show in a Suitcase’. 

The show needs to include original puppetry elements that are all contained in a suitcase with the idea that it can be packed away and travel easily. 

It will be aimed at children between age 5-7, use no technical lighting and hopefully have some level of musical accompaniment or collaboration. 

In its final form it will be documented in film and developed along side the performances of the other Puppetry MA’s. 

In rehearsal before the R&D showing we discussed including an additional Mouse puppet in the show as a cute snippet of puppetry at the beginning. The puppet below is what I created to fill this role but that never got included in the final performance as it just didn’t fit. 

In rehearsal with this puppet, we found that it also didn’t move particularly well with any action more than just poking its head out of a sock and so it didn’t make the cut. 

After the version above I added string arms with little rods to give the arms better movement so the version below is at its most adaptable. Cute but it didn’t fit. 

During the R&D rehearsals we talked about adding some nuts that the squirrel eats and maybe holds in its hands - this never made it into the final show but the nuts are in the bird feeder they’re just not seen by the audience.

Even though they’re not seen in the show, I had a lot of fun making them and I got to use some of the skills I learnt in the first few weeks of term to mould an acorn, cast it in silicone and then make various resin casts from that mould. 

The first ones I made were a bit round but they were good testers and I eventually made a more oval shaped/less pointy acorn that is in the final show. 

I played around a bit with fillers in the eurathene resin to add colour to the acorns without needing to paint them. I used a copper powder and a brass powder which looked nice but could end up expensive to make many of. 

I finally tried a resin specific dye and gold glitter powder and I found this worked the best. I think they catch the light nicely and I like being able to hear them rattle around in the bird feeder during the show. 

After the R&D, and having actually puppeteered the puppets, there were lots of tweaks and final additions to be made. 

For squirrel, I added padding to the outside of its legs to give it a rounder shape and then covered with the same style collaged fabric as the body. The squirrel puppet made very loud noises when its legs hit the floor so i also added padding to the base of the puppets feet. After a bit more playing around and rehearsal I realised that the noise was not coming from the puppets feet but from the base of the legs hitting the wood and so I added extra padding there too and that made significant difference to the noise. 

I padded the arms with some wadding and covered them with the same fabric ‘skin’ and created a warbler tube for the back of the arms to sit in which meant they were able to move up and down freely still. 

I added more fabric to the tail so that it was bushier and some whiskers using the broom bristles from the earlier spine experiment. 

Below is the final puppet in action having just noticed the nut in the bird feeder! 🌰

Looking a little closer at the hedgehogs spines and face (image references here - https://pin.it/6ydS6sv I tried to figure out what might be a soft but clear way of making hedgehog spines for the plasterzote/fabric hedgehog that I had made. 

You can see form the images that the spines at the front are more fur like and soft and then their protective armour is harder and has multiple colours up the spine. This is something I intended to replicate. 

Initially i experimented with cutting the bristles off a broom and fixing them in a latex base to get the density of spines that the images above have, but also a softness and flexibility that meant the puppet could curl into a ball. 

I found that the base of latex as too dense for the body of the puppet that I had and that the latex didn’t really work with the appearance I was aiming for. The spines also tended to fall out of the latex easily and I was weary of ending up with a bald hedgehog after one use. 

I umm-ed and ahh-ed over what might be a good texture and softness for the puppet having used thin card in my maquettes but the card was very flat and felt a bit soft and unnatural on the puppet that was layered with fabric. 

I then tried using cocktail sticks. I dyed the sticks black using fabric dye like I did with the fabric scraps for the body and found this worked really well and meant i could dye lots at once and not change the texture of the stick. It gave the spines a dark base as my research images had. They stuck really well into the plasterzote with a little force and didn’t fall out when the body was moved. 

I also dyed the elastic that hold the body together and gives the puppet a spring back. 

After dying the sticks I pushed them into the body to give the hedgehog spines! I think she looked a little intense with just the black spines and so experimented with dry brushing the spines with paint to give them some colour variations. 

I attached the whole body together with the dyed elastic and below is the nearly finished hedgehog puppet with the fabric ‘skin’ and sharp spines (minus the final colour gradient from my experiment above). At this point I didn’t want to fix the elastic so that I could play around with the tension and make sure it was loose enough to curl into a ball but didn’t look too armadillo-like with the segments. 

I also added two chunky handles on one side so I could manipulate the body in a wiggling motion like the maquette I made with the segments. The maquette had control from above but i found since this was larger and the show was mostly floor based, the side rods meant i didn’t block the puppet and I had more control of the movements. 

For squirrel I used a similar wedge technique with palsterzote as the hedgehog but glued alone a spine made of calico glued together like leather. This gave a nice flexible forward and backward movement that could be controlled from the head and weighted by the base. 

The head was also made of Plazterzote and since i found sticking anything to the plasterzote tricky, I did the same as with Hedgehog and gave it a coating of brown papermache. I think this also gave a nice under skin colour so if there were any gaps in the decoration it wouldn’t show through as black. 

The shape of the head was cut in two planes on the bandsaw and then sanded on the beltsander to give it a nice tapered finish. 

Using the same technique as Hedgehog to give Squirrel a fur like texture I used fabric scraps, a mix of linen, cotton and hessian to add a watercolour/collage style texture. The ears were made of scrap leather left over from another project and the eyes are half-beads designed for teddy bears. 

One of the fabrics I used had a brown/beige/white floral pattern on it and I really like how the pattern adds a little extra texture to the finish of the puppet. 

I papermached the body in the same way as the head, and attached the head with a thiner strip of the same material I used for the body spine. 

I used the same technique to decorate the body as I did the head with the fabric scraps. Using the different coloured fabrics I graded the colour to imitate the way squirrels fur change colour from their backs to their front. I used some of the fabrics I dyed as well as a mixture of fabrics in their original colours too.