The Harmonica Puppet

About a year ago, I had a crush on a specific music instrument called : Diatonic Harmonica.
I was like totally amazed by its magical sound. I bought some harps (harmonica) and tried to learn to play them.
Soon after that, I had a new hobby : playing the harmonica...!
I really enjoyed every moment when I could play this instrument.
One day I came up with an idea : Why didn't I make a movie about my hobbies?
So I decided to give it a try : a short movie about a puppet playing the harmonica! Yes, it's the Harmonica Puppet!

Here it is...:D

Looking back...

It's been a while since PuppetO started it's journey. Some performances have been made, and  I'm looking forward to do the next steps : doing more shows and making more puppets. I hope I can start those stuffs as soon as possible.
Now, take a break for a minute or two, and see some of PuppetO's journey in this picture.
Enjoy it...:)

We're on screen, mate...!

Last year I had a chance to go to an Electronic Fair in the city. There, I bought a low-end video camera. Well, it wasn't that low, cause it had that HighDefinition (HD) thing in it though.....:D
I didn't use it very often until the Christmas was about to come. So I thought it would be a great idea to do a short film with my handycam. And it just came up to my mind to make a kind of a Christmas Greeting with the puppets.
Forgive me if it's not that good, because I had no experience in video-editing before.
So check this out...!

Up to the Stage...

For every dream comes true, there is a story that needs to be done....

Yup!
My dream was to do a show with my own hand-puppets and all I needed was a perfect time to do that.

It turned out that the moment was on my daughter's 2nd birthday. Me and my wife planned to make a simple party for her, at one of the local McD's restaurants. The only entertainment for kids provided by the restaurant, was a clown show. So I thought, why didn't I do my own puppet show for my daughter? Wouldn't  it be a wonderful birthday gift for her? 

My wife and a friend of mine supported me to take this chance, so I decided to do the show. It was the first show for Mono and KinKin, and they sure did make my daughter very happy.

Here are some pics of the very first performance of Mono and KinKin :

Meet the First Trio...

Finally, after some painstaking experiments of hand-stitching, I did finish the skin for some of my puppet heads with fleece. Infact, I managed to continue to make the bodies for my first two puppets. I actually wanted to make three of them, but I got stuck on the third one. Anyway, here are my first trio : Mono, KinKin and Dunnow.
Mono and KinKin would soon do their first performance, while Dunnow was still under construction.

Below is the picture of them (clockwise) : Mono, KinKin, Dunnow.

Better not be naked! (Part-2)

The fleece was ready, and  next step was to cover the puppet head with it. This means, I had to do some stitching to complete the puppet head's skin. Unfortunately, I had no experience in sewing fabrics at all. So, I searched again in the internet and found this article about stitches.
Not long after that, I started to do hand-stitching to sew the fleece covering the puppet head. It was a painstaking process to do, but hey..no pain no gain...!
So, here are two pictures, depicting my first completed puppet head before and after I covered it with blue fleece.

Better not be naked! (Part-1)

The heads were done and I was thinking of something  I could do about them. "Time to take it to the higher level!", I said to myself.

The next level was to cover the finished head with a certain fabric as the "skin" for the puppet. This was like a giant step for me, because I absolutely had to learn a lot about fabrics and how to sew fabrics.

First thing first!

Looking for the perfect fabric for the skin is very important. Since I was a big fan of The Muppets and Sesame Street, I decided to use the fleece fabric to cover my puppets. Why? Because that was the kind of fabric used by most of the puppets in The Muppets and Sesame Street. And to be more specific, it was the Antron Fleece.

But here in my country, Indonesia, it was not that easy to find that typical fleece, even in a metropolitan city like Jakarta. It took me a while to finally locate the store that sold such fleece fabric. It was in the heart of Jakarta, a well-known location to buy textiles and garments called Pasar Tanah Abang. Previously, I went to another textiles and garments market in southern Jakarta, called Pasar Cipadu, but couldn't find such fleece.

What could be a problem was that, the seller did not call the fabric as "FLEECE". Instead, they called it "Kain Emen". Perhaps it was not quite the same with the Antron Fleece, but at least it had some similarities to the Antron, so I decided to use it anyway.

Heading for more heads...

Like I've written in the previous post, I finally did my first attempt to build a puppet, using a free puppet pattern from Bashful Puppet.com.
It was actually a head pattern, and I didn't have much trouble building it. But then I was like meeting a dead end. I didn't know what to do after that. The head was finished and that was it!
FYI, for the material of the head, I used polyurethane foam sheets just like the ones which are used to make matresses, cushions, insulations, etc.
So, because at that time I had no idea what to do next, I decided to make some heads. I tried to do some modifications. I even attempted to create a new pattern, but it turned out to be totally failed.
Anyway, here are some pictures of my puppethead-will-be.

Puppet Building - My First Attempt

I always had a dream to build my own hand puppet, and it wasn't easy to make it happen. It took me some times to finally start the process, and it was a long process, since the biggest challenge for me is to motivate my self to start it. Hey, the first step is the hardest part to do, right? I started by looking for some puppet-building tutorials in the internet. I found a lot of websites, blogs and puppetry-forums, but there were only few which showed detail informations about puppet building. Some of them provided step-by-step tutorials (and video-tutorials) of how to make your own hand puppet. Some only gave me brief explanations about it. I learned that before you could make your own puppet, you should prepare yourself with a good understanding about (at least) these things :

1.  Puppet Design & Puppet Pattern Making 
2.  Material Selection 
3.  Sewing Skills 

 Looking for a perfect puppet pattern could be frustrating, but not until I found this website. It gave me the free puppet pattern that, in my opinion, is suitable for beginners. So, thanks to Bashful Puppet, I finally could make my first attempt to build a hand puppet of my own. Here are some pictures, showing my very first try to build a hand puppet.