Tuesday

Fluffed It

POSTDATED - 13/04/12

The next stage, after having taken off the cling film and tape in one piece, was to cut it into several smaller pieces. Here I was going to create seam lines along shoulders, hips, neck - essentially, any area of the puppet where there would be movement.
 After this I took the 3d impressions of the puppet's surface and cut darts into them, trying to flatten them out so that I could make a pattern from the raw material. This was where I found this method tricky because, unlike making human clothes, there are no readily available patterns from which to take reference as the fur needs to be custom fit around the contours of the wolf's body. The problem I found was that I couldn't find strategic enough places to put the cuts unless the shape was very simple - like the tail. The result being that I was left with complicated patterns that were flat, but near impossible to put back on to the puppet, and even so were so full of gaps they would take too long to stitch back together.
 I decided to abandon the cling film and masking tape method and tried another, admittedly terrible, idea whereby I glued the fur on in strips. This did allow me to cover the contours of the body, but left many gaps between strips that looked fine when the wolf was in one position, but as soon as it moved would pull apart at those gaps. Again, this would require far too much unnecessary stitching so I slipped on my thinking face and went hmmm.
 After considerable hmmm-ing, and various permutations of the phrase 'how the bloody bollocks am I going to do this?' I started pinning fabric to a leg, pinching the excess fabric into triangles around the contours and then cutting 'darts' into the fabric (on the recommendation of the lovely Fiona, our fashion lady helper) to remove it. This involved lots of pinning and snipping, and I was worried the pattern was again going to be too complicated to reassemble. This time I put on my hmmm face with added aarggg!

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