Puppets and Banjos

Friday, May 1, 2015

Puppet Making at the John C. Campbell Folk School 2015 Edition!

2015 marks my third year teaching puppet making at the John C. Campbell Folk School in Brasstown, NC. I love teaching at the Folk School because it gives me an opportunity to share the knowledge and techniques that I have been using and developing as a puppet builder with people who may have never tried to create a puppet character. This year, 6 exceedingly talented students, covering a broad age range, created 6 very dynamic characters. Over the course of 5 days, my class worked very hard learning the fundamentals of foam rubber and fleece puppet construction. Gradually, as the week went on, these wonderful characters began to emerge.

"Susie Mae" in progress by Mary Jo Campbell

Lacey working on "Aunt Flo."

Zachary and his dinosaur expert!

Pam working on Carey the hockey player.

Jeff working on "Bad Ass"

My alien creation!

Details mean lots of hand stitching.

He didn't get the message about running with scissors.

Jan Davidson with son, Sam, who's inside this lovely parade puppet for the May Day Parade

Nannette Davidson with her parade puppet creation.

Looking forward to teaching this class again in 2016! For more information, visit: https://www.folkschool.org/

Sunday, March 1, 2015

The Pirate Stanley Show - Making a Pirate Spyglass!

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Monday, March 24, 2014

Custom Monster!

Here's a custom monster I just finished for my friend, Zachary. He gave me some ideas of the monster he wanted, including an eyebrow mechanism! He was a lot of fun to work on!

Here's a look inside the head. The eyebrow mech is a simple one: a piece of welding rod that curves around each eye and loops inside the head to form a lever. When pushed up, the lids go down. When pushed down, the lids move up. This is controlled by the middle finger of the performers' hand.

To create the gnarly texture for the monsters' fur, I used an old Muppet trick of boiling the fur fabric first.

These eyes are made from large sized Easter eggs!

Whips of feathers were added into the fur to give some added texture.

Here's the final monster in action:

Tuesday, February 4, 2014

Portrait Puppets!

Every now and then I get a request to build portrait puppets for a client. Recently, I was contacted by a fellow named Joel in California who wanted to have two portrait puppets constructed for he and his girlfriend. His plan is to use these puppets to pop "the big question" to her over Valentine's Day! Of course, we were happy to fill his order. Joel is thrilled with them (we're pretty proud of them, too!) and wish him the best of luck next week! Hope these do the trick and she says "YES!" Fingers crossed, Joel!