Puppet Carving Course: Day 4

Today is the last full day of my carving course. It has been a marathon of aclass today staring at 8:30 this morning and finishing just after 10 this evening, but I think I can say with that by 3:30 tomorrow afternoon I will have a full jointed and working puppet.

 

I spent most of the morning carving out her hip joints. It was a slow process taking little bits of wood away, then fitting the leg in place, seeing how it sat and the range of movement, then taking it apart and carving a bit more, you just have to keeping going until its sits perfectly then you have to start all over again for other leg. The idea is that the leg will look and look and sit evenly in all positions. She is going to be living on a shelf in my work room,spending most of her life sitting down, so I needed to make sure that this position looks perfect which meant the hips had to be carved quite a bit.

 

My tutor has a really clever way of carving hands. He got us to drew of the shape of the hand we wanted, palm face up. Then measure the width, and add half again. This is the depth of the block of wood needed. Trace the design onto the wood and cut with the bandsaw. You then carve either side of the wood block so that they are a mirror image of each other, they are the backs of the hands. Spit the wood block and carve the insides. This means that if your puppet has small hands they are easier and less fragile to carve.

 

I have wanted to make a movable waist joint for a while now, but I was not sure how to do it in wood. I talk to John my tutor about it and it was something that he had never done before either. We sat down together with off cuts of wood and bits of paper and worked out a mechanism that would allow the waist to twist and bend slightly forward. Then came the real test, seeing if it worked on my puppet. Tentatively I carved out the sections of wood and hollowed out the body. Surprisingly it all fitted with very little effort. Now she had a very lovely moving waist.

 

I also managed to find time to make her feet a lot smaller and they are now in proportion with the rest of her body, at one stage yesterday they were larger than her head. I have no idea how I managed to make them so big, when everything looked OK on my drawing. Anyway they are dainty now and also have been fitted to her legs with a joint that allows her foot to have a slight rock when she walks.

 

At about lunch time I felt this wave of stress rush over me, I suddenly became very aware of how little time, I had left on the course. It was probably inevitable I would feel like that. These types of courses are so very intense and we have been putting in 13 hour days all week. I want to get as much as I can out of it and learn every thin I can. So I can go home and do it all again in the shed. I had some tea, a a little break and felt a bit better.

 

I am very tied. I'm looking forward to laying in for a bit on Saturday and just being lazy. I have so many ideas that on Sunday I think I will start a new doll.