Puppetry

“Then came the part of the class I dreaded. The description said no sewing experience was necessary, and aside from needlepoint in grade school, I didn’t know squat about sewing beyond licking the thread to get it through the eye of the needle. They demonstrated step-by-step, multiple times, how to use a sewing machine for the arms by creating backstitches, and how to sew the body by hand using a whipstitch. I was the student who asked the most questions. Mostly “like this?” over and over again. Jessie and Gus were very patient with me. By the end, I felt like I was getting into a pretty decent groove with hand sewing. I could’ve gone into a meditative state with the repetitive motions, if it weren’t for all the loud conversations and circus music playing in the background.”

“It was so much fun to see all our puppets come to life together! Or rather, turn from hand-mummies into faceless almost-friends! The final stage of puppet building was making the face, the most fun part. With our puppet bodies on stands, we used hot glue to attach eyeballs, noses, tongues, hair, and jewelry from their wide array of foam balls, pieces of felt, pipe cleaners, and other craft store goodies. Before Jessie began her lecture on shaving puppet fur and glueing on accessories, she warned us that this was the part of the process where a whole puppet can be permanently ruined! High stakes!”

“I'm fairly new to puppetry, but I actually thought I caught on fast and was doing well until I really started trying to do more than one thing at a time! Like gees, just trying to shake the puppets head no while talking is hard, and dont even get me started on rod arms”