Although I don’t generally like doing repairs (there are exceptions) it’s part of the business, and sometimes interesting to find out how something is made.

One of my clients asked me to mend a hat that he uses for some of his gigs. The brim is quite thick, and its shape was disintegrating. Much to our surprise there were lots of little chunks of wood inside! On the intact side the bits were glued together into a set shape, but elsewhere they were broken up and higgledy-piggledy. Today I poked around a bit more and ended up taking them all out. I’ll probably replace them with shaped foam.

The hat is from the Calcutta Sola Hat Agency, which was enough of a lead to work out on Google that this is a sholapith helmet, and the bits inside are actually pith! It’s the inside spongy core of a water plant which can be pressed and shaped into works of art. I hadn’t ever looked into why pith helmets had that name. It looks as if the hat makers pressed the pith into a newspaper-lined hat mold, and then sealed it off with a few more layers of paper, before covering it with cloth.

The custom softie I was making last week was “Officer Dan”, the face of a new board game called Highway Patrol. He will be part of the game promotion when its inventors travel to the International Toy Trade Show in New York next week.

I’ll post a few more making photo’s in my photoset at Flickr in the next day or two.

Check out the amazingly cute miniature giraffe! She is also in this ad.  Awwww!  The world wide famous Sokoblovsky Farms, Russia’s finest,  bill themselves as the best and only breeders of petite lap giraffes, if  you’d like one of your own ;)

Shortly after the Kinect was launched in late 2010 Emily Gobeille and Theo Watson from Design I/O used it make a quick interactive puppet protoype by skeleton tracking on an arm. Their updated 2.0 installation above, Puppet Parade, looks great fun, allowing

children to use their arms to puppeteer larger than life creatures projected on the wall in front of them. Children can also step in to the environment and interact with the puppets directly, petting them or making food for them to eat. This dual interactive setup allows children to perform alongside the puppets, blurring the line between the ‘audience’ and the puppeteers and creating an endlessly playful dialogue between the children in the space and the children puppeteering the creatures.

The unedited clip where it is easier to see the movements in more focus is also interesting. Although these are made differently they share some qualities with Philip Worthington’s earlier Shadow Monsters.

This fantastic air-powered 16 foot tall spider puppet is made by Tim Davies. Wired.co.uk has more technical details about the structure and how it operates. (I think this information must come from the artist’s site, but it is down at the moment).

Kate Bush’s cool shadow puppet animation, Eider Falls at Lake Tahoe, was made to accompany a segment of the track Lake Tahoe on her new album 50 Words For Snow. In a note about the animation on her site she credits Robert Allsopp for the beautiful puppets.

If you are in Melbourne, the shadow puppetry featured in tonight’s Melbourne Australia Day Concert 2012, What’s in your Suitcase?’ should be a treat. Gary Friedman is the puppetry producer and puppeteer, accompanied by a number of supporting puppeteers, and Conor Fox the puppetry director. Gary also designed the 60 square metre suitcase set that doubles as a shadow screen. I hope we get to see video footage of the puppetry sequences later.

I’m happy to see a strong representation of the multicultural stories and identity that make up Australia today.

The concert starts at 7pm at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl, and the program and full credits are available in the concert handout (pdf).

Continuing on with my pattern making, once the clay sculpt is done I cover it first with aluminium foil, and then with masking tape. The foil covers the complex contours easily and stays in place, and the masking tape holds the foil shape together when it comes off the maquette.

I draw cutting lines keeping in mind both where to cut to get the pattern off the model easily, and where seams are going to be best for assembling the final pattern in fabric. I also sometimes mark midlines or possible dart lines that might be useful later.

It’s also good to label the pieces before they are cut off, because they are not alway easy to identify once they are cut up. These are still not 2D; they’ll need to have some further cuts made in them, but I haven’t chosen fabric yet, and if it’s stretchy I may not need as many cuts.

I began a new project yesterday, a commissioned soft plush toy. I can’t disclose exactly what at the moment, but can show some indistinct making shots. A clay maquette is probably a weird way to start a softie, but I find drawing a 2D dressmaking style pattern with darts and tucks difficult. It’s much quicker for me to start with a 3D shape and make a pattern from that.

Here’s the rough wire armature intended to hold the clay up,

followed by chicken wire and some crumpled newspaper to fill out the space.

Then the clay is sculpted on top, embedding in the wire.

(photo credit: David Gilford/complexify @ Flickr - thanks for the CC license)

This beautiful sculpture of the notorious albino sperm whale, Mocha Dick is by the artist Tristin Lowe, made in collaboration with the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia. It’s huge! – 52 feet long and 10 feet tall – and made of industrial wool pieced over an inflatable vinyl understructure. The gallery at the Virginia Musuem of Fine Arts shows some other great images including a close-up the barnacles.