The Prototypes

For my project, I knew I wanted to explore making a puppet of some sort, however, part of the woodwork brief involved subverting a traditional toy in order to create a new one. As a result, I spent today in the workshop playing about with forms and finishes and thinking about how I could make my toy fit the brief.

I looked at the parts of the larger forms I had turned and decided that I liked the curved ends more than the flat ones as they looked more finished to me, so in the workshop I cut them up and started playing about with them as separate pieces of one form.

Initially, I thought I was going to create a form like the one depicted above with one front and one back section both being movable, however, after cutting my pieces, I quite liked the look of the two heads back to back. The form reminded me of a pushmi–pullyu from Dr Doolittle and, I think, made the toy a bit more absurd and fun.

After deciding on this form, I started to think about how I could attach my pieces, thinking about fabric joins, wood joins and finally, a spring. As I used to really like playing with my slinky as a child, to me, a spring fits better as a join for my toy than fabric or wood. As a result, I used my previous test pieces to try this out with a smaller spring and really liked how it turned out.