I've begun a new puppet.  The character is Taylor Termite.  She's an energetic, kindergarten age student at Lilac Hollow Elementry School with an almost uncontrolable urge to chew on wood, which is a constant source of distraction for Prof. Inch.

Here is a sketch of what I plan for her to look like.


This puppet is going to be too small for a persons hand to fit inside the head so I built a rod mechanish to opperate the mouth and turn the head.



I've given a description of how I built the rod on my Bashful Puppet blog page if your interested. http://bashfulpuppet.blogspot.com/

I'll keep you posted with my progress in the build but I plan to put a more complete discription of the build on the blog.

I can't wait to watch the progress!  I will be especially to see how the mechanism works. Is it possible to show that as you work? Reading the explanation is usually not enough for me since I am too visual of a learner.  Maybe a video of how it works? Anyway - can't wait to see the progress.

I agree  From the looks of the past puppets and your design............... This is going to be a good one too. Thank You for sharing. can't wait until we can see them all in action. keep 'Em coming.

Billy D.

Nice internal marionette. I checked out the bolg you posted, and the other puppets look well crafted, and approachable. Great for kids. I also have an internal marionette. Squakly, a mutated bird escaped from an evil science lab. Do you have any gloved puppets?

Hiya,
Am looking forward to seeing the progress on this puppet. There is a real attention to detail in all of your puppets which makes the final puppet look very professional. well done and thanks for the inspiration that you give by showing us your progress.

cheers
Spam 

Looks like a nice new challenge. 

Daryl H

Hey thanks for the encouraging comments.  Its great to get feed back from people that actually can understand and appreciate the work your doing.

Well, I had some problems with the rod mechanism.  The guitar wires couldn't handle the kind of action that the rod gave to them and were breaking.  So I redesigned it.  I repositioned the trigger.  Used a length of hanger wire to connect the trigger to the mouth bar and attached the spring directly to the mouth bar.  Once a decided what I needed to do the rebuild took about 15 minutes.  Wish I thought of it in the first place it was a lot simpler and works better.  Below are some pictures to give you a better understanding of the changes I made.





A more complete description is on http://bashfulpuppet.blogspot.com/.

Do you have any gloved puppets?

Hey thnaks for looks at my blog.  In answer to your question ... I have not made any gloved puppets.  Actually, Taylor is only the fifth puppet I've ever made so there's a lot of puppets I've not yet tried my hand a making.  I'm just kind of building what gets my creative juices going at the time.  Most of what's drivng my puppet related creativity right now is geared toward getting the Joshua Junebug and Friends characters built and the set designed.

Just wanted to give an update on the termite build.  The head is basically foamed out.  The next stage is to build the thorax of the body.  Below is are some pictures of the ehad with the rod mechanism inserted.  Check out the bAshful Puppet blog for a full description.

I started to post this on your blog but did not have my Google account info handy so decided to post it here instead.

Nice rod mechanism. I am curious why you changed the action from pull to push? 

Here is my thought, if you simply replaced the guitar wire with the same coat hanger leaving it in the same front position then you could have put a small loop in the end of the wire that you could slip your pointer finger into and pull down to open the mouth. That could possibly make the puppet easier to manipulate.

That is actually not an original idea on my part but how I have seen others do it.