So I wanted to do some needle work just so that all my time isn't consumed in making puppets and being constantly covered in latex! I met this lovely fellow over a year ago now at Westonburt Arboretum but he has become the subject for my needle to bring to life.

I'm stitching this freehand but traced the outline of the 'Wol' first and stitched over this to ensure the end result resembles some shape similar to my friend above!

As a fun little extra for this project, I'm creating a time lapse video as I stitch so that I'll be able to watch dear little Wol come to life before my eyes. Here's a sneak peek of where I'm up to so far:

As you have seen in a previous post, I have made a few sets of latex puppet hands. Here is what they look like.

Following on from my idea of the Librarian character whose veins have words running through them, I thought it would be a good idea to test some materials such as their movement abilities and their aesthetic qualities on these hands in the hope that I will find something that I can use in a future puppet.

As you may have seen in a previous post, I had been stitching words into a dissolvable fabric which would allow me to have thread words which I could then combine with latex onto my puppets hands to create the look of words in the skin.

The end result not surprisingly wasn't very good. The thread had started to unravell so the letters were unledgable and it was very raised up from the skin which didn't look right. When the joints were moved parts of thread became loose whereas others restricted the movement of the hand itself.

For this hand I just used a pemanent marker to write onto the skin. This obviously didn't affect the movement of the hand and was quick and easy to do but it isn't at all what I want it to look like aesthetically.

This is the closest any of the latex hands got to looking how I wanted them to look. However, the book pages would have to be applied to areas of skin that didn't need to move, ie. not on joints as they would rip. Also size is an issues, these hands have been made bigger for experimental purposes so an actual sized puppet hand might find difficulty in having bits of book pages applied to it.

I had bought some translucent liquid sculpey (bought here) just to experiment with. One of it's qualities is that it is a good transfer medium, so I thought I would experiment in trying to transfer a book page onto a sculpey hand. I couldn't do this to a latex hand as the sculpey needed to be baked.

Aesthetically this was perfect! Just what I wanted. However this was obviously on a sculpey hand, and therefore unanimatable and unsuitable for a puppet. My plan is to make a marrionette puppet in this technique and to carry on experimenting for my stop-motion librarian.

I've been stitching letters and words onto a plastic fabric that melts in hot water on my sewing machine using the free-hand foot. These are going to be used in some experiments with latex for a stop-motion puppet's skin. I just quite liked these photo's...