Two woolly monsters emigrate to Hawaii...

Here are some photos of the two woolly monster puppets I made to send to John Hankins (castlegardener) as part of the international animation co-op. They are provisionally called 'Dad' and 'Toddler'. I'm afraid the lighting and focus in the photos is not great - I took them in a hurry under yellowish a light with no flash.

The Dad is a little smaller than my usual puppets, and is about 10 inches tall, the Toddler is tiny, just over 4 inches tall, and had to be made using miniature crochet with a 1mm hook.

Both puppets have aluminium armature wire and epoxy putty armatures which I wrapped with polyfibre wadding stuck in place with Copydex latex glue (one of the most versatile mediums in the world). The skins are made of hand crocheted yarn, acrylic and wool/acrylic blend in the case of the Dad puppet, and very fine angora/lambswool blend for the Toddler. The armature for the father had to be completed in stages after certain parts of the woolly skin had been sewn into place, otherwise the hands would have been too big to pass through the 'sleeves' of the skin.

The mouths are felt replacements, and other details are made using buttons and fluffy pom-poms. As usual I used french knitting (done on a circular four-pin bobbin) for Dad's fingers, which are threaded over latex and wool wrapped wire fingers.

More random props...

Just some more assorted props I've made for the international stop-motion co-op project. The measurements on the set-square are in inches.

Here is some tiny crocheted stuff. The blanket, pillow and cushion were made with a 1mm hook, the doily in the second photo was made with a 0.6mm hook. They took nearly as long to make as they would have done if they were full size because they contain almost the same number of stitches!

Here are a couple of rather contemporary looking stools I made. The seat cushions are hand crocheted and the bases are just frosted glass jars turned upside down:

Here is a tea-set. It's a bit too small for the scale of the rest of the set, so maybe it's an espresso set. I just used a 'Disney fairies' doll's china tea-set from the pound-shop, peeled off the fairy stickers and drew flowers on with Sharpie markers. I sealed the surface using an acrylic based varnish:

I also made a bowl of 'monster fruits' using a little glass sauce-dish and an assortment of glass and wooden beads with green neoprene stalks:

I'm off to London on Wednesday for 6 days, for a marathon of museum and art gallery visiting, and also to meet up with James Geard, director of 'Walter Gloom', to talk about film stuff.

I won't have any internet access, so I apologise in advance for not replying to any emails for a while.

Finally, some alien industral set photos!

At last, here they are, some photos of my woolly monsters in their finished alien technology set, ready to animate! The photos were taken using my new FZ50 and you can click on them to see the BIG versions on flickr:











It's probably best not to ask what the heck is going on in the last photo!

Phyllis Pamplemousse

I can now reveal my most recent woolly monster toy, as it is now safely with its new owner Helen Gibbons (aka Shine). Helen is a incredibly talented fibre-artist and was a fellow 'intellectual rebel' when we were at high school together ('intellectual rebel' sounds better than trying to explain the chaos that was TEKAYL... eh Helen!). I made her a monster in exchange for a fantastic pair of hand-knitted socks she made for me, which are currently keeping my feet toasty warm.

Her special monster requests were:

Fierceness

Colours you can see from space

Lots of legs/tentacles

Lots of eyes

The result is the very toothy, seven-legged monster, Phyllis Pamplemousse:

Phyllis is pretty big (I forgot to measure her before I put her in the post, but I'd guess she's about 14" diameter) and her main body is made of crimson acrylic doubleknit yarn crocheted together with bright scarlet mohair to make a thick fuzzy fabric. The rest of her is made of acrylic doubleknit in dark purple, light violet, a golden yellow colour and black. The eye buttons are just a selection of buttons I already had in my button boxes, but finding the perfect buttons for teeth was a bigger challenge!

I knew I needed some big toothy looking toggles for optimum fierceness and set about trying to find some of those shark-tooth shaped toggles that you used to find on duffle coats, only to find that they must be the most out of fashion buttons in the world. After trips to Bury, Chorley and Bolton markets, numerous habedashery shops and lots of internet button suppliers, I could only find some ugly dark grey ones - not toothy at all. In the end, ebay came to my rescue and I found some flat bottomed white toggles that were even more perfect for Phyllis than the shark-tooth ones I had originally imagined!

Here is Phyllis' story:

Smaller and smaller....

Well I've managed it! I can now crochet with a 0.6mm hook (usually used for fine lace-making) and single thread wool yarn (more commonly used for weaving cloth). It's mainly my poor eyesight that makes it tricky, the actual action of crocheting is exactly the same as on a normal scale.

I made a tiny woolly bobble hat! It is about 19mm in diameter (60mm circumference) and 15mm tall (not including bobble). I used double crochet stitch (that's single crochet if you're American) for most of it and treble crochet (double crochet if you are American) to give it a ridged edging. It is 38 stitches around at the widest point. The tip of my (slightly scarred) index finger is in the photos for scale.

Here it is actual size (assuming you are viewing this the same size as I am).

I've worked out that if it is supposed to be an adult sized hat then it is between 1:10 and 1:9 scale. To be honest I think this is as small as I can go - once the stitches get smaller than 1mm square, my eyes can't cope anymore!

Yarn heaven and mini crocheting...

Inspired by Emmyymme's recent miniature knitting exploits (plus the fact that I just treated myself to a full range of 21 crochet hooks ranging from 0.6mm -10mm), I decided to have a go at some miniature crochet. The first thing I made was a mini blanket. I used 2ply woollen yarn and a 1mm crochet hook.

So far it is about 13 cm square (about 5 inches) and I am going to finish it off by edging it in another shade of blue. I'm also going to make a mini 'granny square' patchwork blanket as soon as I get some more 2ply wool in different colours.



Next, I decided to make a miniature crochet monster:



She is 9cm / 3.5 inches tall (not including tufty bits) and her name is Delilah Axolotl (on account of her tufty 'gills' and the fact that axolotls are my new favourite creature after seeing one on QI last night). My usual woolly monster puppets are about 10-14 inches tall, so Delilah is small enough to be a doll for one of them.

I have not tried crocheting with single ply yarn and a 0.6mm hook yet. To be honest I'm not sure whether it's really necessary to go that small for my purposes - I'm never likely to work at 1:12 scale or smaller!

I have also discovered possibly the most amazing discount yarn supplier in the world. For anyone who likes doing any kind of needlecraft or textile work and can feasibly travel to Heywood (near Bury/Bolton in Lancashire, northwest England) - it is essential that you visit this place!
The shop is only open to the public on Fridays 10am - 5pm (other times by arrangement).

http://www.fairfieldyarns.co.uk/

They have an old Co-operative store which has two rooms literally full, from floor to ceiling, of thousands and thousands of part-cones and balls of surplus yarn in every variety imaginable. Wool, cotton, linen, silk, synthetic, metallic, mohair, cashmere, alpaca all in every thickness and colour you could imagine. I'd estimate that most of the cones have 200g-1kg of yarn left on them, and you pay for them by weight. At least half of the yarns are priced as low as 99p/100g!
They have even supplied Cosgrove Hall with yarn for mini-knitting of puppet costumes.

I bought a ball of black and a ball of white acrylic doubleknit (always handy), a cone of turquoise mohair (great for fuzzy monsters), a huge cone of burgundy pure wool doubleknit (or four-ply, it's hard to tell) and some periwinkle blue 2ply and single ply green wool for mini crocheting. The can of 7up is there for scale. I am going back again next Friday to get more colours!