Sewing

Once all the silicone elements had been casted I then set about in fabricating the clothing.  With my coloured character art in hand, I made a nomber of visits to my local fabric store.  I bought multiple cloth strips for each clothing element and I would compare and test these once I returned to my workstation at University.  Sometimes fabric would look different under the studio lights or not drape over the puppet suitably.  Once I had made my decisions on what cloth to use, I set about sewing the elements together with a Sewing Machine which I lent from mt fellow student, Jonathan Garvey.    I also utilized fabric pins, fabric glue and a clover iron to drive out any wrinkles in the fabric.

I found that the blue material I used for the Princess' dress was too 'puffy' in the end.  I had no time to revise and so had to continue onto the other costumes.  If I had another week or two I would have redone this element.

When working on multiple puppets at a time I found that my workstation would get rather messy - as seen above.  The Father's leather arm gauntlets were made from miliput and painted to look like leather.

Here I am placing the gold detailing onto the puppet.  These were first sculpted and then casted in batches using resin.  I then painted each of these pieces in gold, ensuring that the lower sides were painted with a slightly darker colour as they would be facing downwards.  The belt was fabricated from a strip of leather with the buckle glued on which was sculpted with a kneaditite/miliput mix.