I've Been A Little Busy...

...lately. Between a fabulous trip to Banff to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary, my birthday, and helping out puppeteers, I have had no time to blog.

I have had time to knit, though. As part of my ongoing involvement with the Odd-lot Puppetry Co., I was invited to put items for sale into a marketplace booth at InterPLAY last weekend. So I made puppets. More specifically finger puppets, or, as I called them, Puplets. I designed knitted and fulled finger puppets based upon the characters in one of the shows the puppet troupe performed at the festival.

I started with a character, a sketch and a few scraps of handspun or custom-dyed yarn.

Then I knit an oversized finger puppet on 4 mm double-pointed needles.

Each Puplet was hand-felted with lots of soap and hot and cold water. I found that Body Shop Sorbet Fizz bubble bath worked realllly well!

After being washed, the Puplets shrunk to about 2/3 of their original size and were wonderfully compacted and fuzzy.

Then each Puplet was hand-finished with noses, eyes, and other features by using various techniques, such as needle felting, embroidery and beadwork.

And we have a Neeno Greckon Puplet. Neeno is one of the stars of the Odd-lot Puppetry Company's show K.I.N.D.A.Works. Some of his costars include...

Phil, the apparently sideways scientist. (Clearly my technical skills are collapsing around this post--I have no idea why this and the following picture have been turned sideways by Blogger, or why my presumed-deleted dial-up wizard keeps popping up while I type! Help! I need a nerd!)

My personal favorite was Larry the Lab Rat. Just tilt your head to the right. He's cute--and he sold out!

All in all, I made 40 of these little suckers over the course of about a week. At about an hour each, that made for a full-time workweek! The best part was that I sold 25 of them.

I have never considered myself much of a production type. I prefer to do something once, them move on. This was definitely a production project, 5 of each type of puppet, and I enjoyed it thoroughly. Perhaps it's time to set up at craft sales...

Maybe later. Right now, I have to go throw my computer out the window!