Greetings to Everyone - this is the continuation of our story of the Puppet making collaboration between our Puppeteer Customer, MrJS from Tulsa, Okalahoma and Isobel, which has been in progress since October 2014, and is reaching its final stages.
Last week, I told you about DanielS Puppet, who morphed into becoming Collette. It was a shorter post than usual because it took Isobel so long to work out how to transfer the pictures from MrJS's emails onto this blog page. This week, after further study and practice, she thinks she's got it sussed, so, I'd now like to show you what happened to Grandpere Tiger, starting with what he looked likejust before he left us:
This was Grandpere before Isobel added a goatee beard and mustache to his facial features. The next post is of him with the additional details added.
She wasn't entirely happy with this result, but MrJS - whom you will have realised is pretty handy with the needle and thread himself, said he'd "play" around with what we'd attempted and this is what Grandpere now looks like in the Tulsa Puppet Collection. (His mustache looks much better, and the goatee beard (Isobel's second attempt, actually) looks much more in proportion!)
Isobel then made eight different bodies for MrJS so he could add different heads and dress them up to be some of the characters in the original "Mr. Roger's Neighbourhood" stories.
First he produced "Cornflake" - who in the series ran the Village Shop, apparently. MrJS's version now looks like this:
Thereafter, over the next few weeks, we were sent pictures of - firstly:
The Puppet named Lady Elaine. Now, I think Isobel has said earlier in the Tulsa Puppet Saga, that she herself doesn't actually remember all these characters. When the programme was shown on television when the Family were living in Canada, it was aired at the same time as she was cooking the evening family meal. Thus, she can remember hearing the voices and stories, but cannot always put faces to the sounds. (Both the girls will probably remember them - as they were regular viewers and thoroughly enjoyed meeting the characters.)
This puppet, King Friday, in all his glory, caused MrJS some grief apparently: looking at his royal robes, both of us can see why. The fur trimming on his train in particular must have been difficult to do, let alone his shimmering royal robe. However you can see how his head (and that of Lady Elaine) was attached to our bodies. (It was described very fully in Isobel's last post a couple of weeks ago here).
Finally, for the final member of the Royal Family in Mr. Rogers' Neighbourhood, came Queen Sarah Saturday the 14th.
The final Puppet we created, so far, for MrJS was, of course, Henrietta Pussycat. We had some difficulty in deciding which route to go. Initially, Isobel was going to make a puppet like we'd already done for the Tigers, using MrJS's original flat body pattern and then attaching a Head looking like the original Henrietta (or as near a copy as we could achieve.)
Our version, and how we made her, can be read in Isobel's blog dated 24/04/2015 - Continuation of the Tulsa Puppet Saga, Part 3. However, for the purposes of this post, I'll just include one of the photos that appeared in that story.
The original plan was modified to arrive at this one - where we used the head pattern for our Sitting Cat toy - see
https://www.etsy.com/listing/215101514/cat-fluffy-toy-ginger-white-plush-art?ref=shop_home_active_21
and the body from another Cat Pattern we had in our library, which is still only a prototype and yet to be listed in our Shop (www.Etsy.com/shop/COLDHAMCUDDLIES).
Even though Isobel was slightly quicker at transferring these images this week, it's still taken a long time, and it's time for me to close for this week. However, I'm pleased to be able to tell you that we've begun the prototype final version of Daniel Tiger for MrJS, and hope to have it done by the middle of next week. Then, it will be down to the final version of Daniel himself - once the prototype has been approved.
Until then - Goodnight Everyone - Hope you all have a great week and that the weather is kind to you.
Your Friend. Cy Bear.
