Inspirational photos of REAL Pearly Queens and Kings
Sometimes heads are wooden, and sometimes doing them in Paper Mache Pulp makes more sense .
The hat brim needed on this one made Pulp the right choice
She will sing the music hall favourite "MY OLD MAN SAID FOLLOW THE VAN"
So I need to make here the birdcage with 'me old cock linnet' inside.
It also needs to be able to pivot so it does not look stiff and frozen in her hand.
And to make things more fun, I'd like her to spin and twiddle the cage around at the end of the song.
This means a very tricky, non standard Glove Puppet mechanism.
On the plus side; it only means making one 'regular' carved hand.
So no trying to evenly match a pair.
Once the cage pivots nicely at the wrist it can be decorated with a few plastic beads.
Strong 'stumps' are created on the parts of the glove underbody where my fingers go (the 'arms').
These need to be solid enough to mount the other parts to.
They are made with layers of cotton fabric and PVA glue.
The regular hand and the swivel joint for the cage hand are then first hot glued into the right position.
Then they too are strengthened with more layers of PVA soaked fabric.
A coat of paint transforms everything !
I added a little green 'verdigras' to age the birdcage.
You can clearly see how strongly glued on the hand and stump are.
Some tummy padding sewn over the underskirt helps keep her proportions balanced.
Now she is painted, her elaborately decorated top skirt can be sewn into place.
Making that dress was a labor of love.
I did buy a lot of tiny white buttons and pearlescent white buttons from an online haberdashers.
As well and brand new buttons, I also had a lot that I have cut off shirts and saved over many years.
I was lucky because my stepdad gave me his mums sewing tin of old buttons. In there were quite a few real 'pearly' buttons.
So my puppet will be a blend of old and new buttons , a mix of bought, found and salvaged : just like real Pearly Kings and Queens do it.
Now she is painted and varnished, and has her big dress on, I can start to assemble her blouse piece by piece. The look is really coming together nicely.
The little loops on the black velvet parts are to take her miniature feather boa.
It took several hours sitting listening to nice music, and snuggled up with Bugsy, to sew the words on the back of her velvet jacket. Fiddly but fun.
So nearly finished ... just the feather boa and some hat decoration and she will be complete.
These white plastizote roses were from 'The Range' and were just perfect for the job.
Silk flowers would have actually been too realistic, and looked like fresh cut flowers.
I wanted them to look like fake hat decorations not real flowers, so plastizote was a better choice than silk.
I stripped off some of the outer petals on the bigger blooms, to make them the right size.
In old photos of Pearlies quite a lot of the ladies had feathers and plumage in their hats.
So I used some of the feather boa on her hat as well as the flowers.
It was joyous to take her along to the next Covent Garden 'Mayfayre' puppet festival and show her off to the real Pearly Queens.
Visiting puppetry dignitaries from France were also very taken with her !
I jest of course, it's my good friend and fellow Punch 'Clubster' Damien Wiess.
