Behind the Scenes: Puffs Puppets

I had the fabulous opportunity to be the Props Designer for our upcoming production of Puffs or 7 Increasingly Eventful Years at a Certain School of Magic and Magic. This story is very near and dear to my soul and when the challenge of creating, tracking, and building mystical and magical items for this show presented itself—I couldn’t help but raise my Puff hand.

We began discussing the extraordinary world of this production back at the end of March and I had planned to document my progress of creating, tracking, and building these certain mystical and magical props that are used during the show.

My first venture has been reinventing some puppets from our storage to portray the “Founders” of the “Certain School of Magic and Magic”.

We are fortunate to have lots of eclectic donations and materials that we keep in storage to assist us in our artistic creations. We keep all of these materials in our Art Storage and Costume Shop.

I went shopping in the Costume Shop for fabric, yarn, and ribbon to help redesign these puppets.

The first puppet I have worked on is Rowena (the blue one). She’s the founder of the “Smarts”.

This girl puppet was gonna need a make-over. No more ratty, yellow shirt and I had to do something with that hair. Luckily the yarn on her head was glued together like a weave and was fairly easy to remove.

Next, I had to make a new weave with black yarn (which was tedious, but worth it). I added some grey in there as well, to give it some dimension. (Yes, I wanted my girl to have full body and voluminous locks.)

After her hair was done, I moved on to her outfit, which we were lucky enough to have some scrap blue velvet—just like the image. I’ve made children’s clothes and costumes before, so I just freehanded a design that I drew on the fabric. The basic no-sleeved form of the dress, followed by some big, wizard-y looking long sleeves.

The final touches were adding feather eyelashes, a book, and a quill.

I’d like to think she looks pretty magical! Our director thinks so!