My friend Loretta came by last week to cut and style all the puppets’ hair.  There are no hairdon’ts here.  Nosir.  I think they’re looking great.

First of all, this character absolutely slays me.  Is she not insanely cute?  She’s not the main character though — she’s her sister, Abigail:

Here’s the Dad, Xosé Luís.  We’re not 100% sure yet about his long 70s shag haircut; this might be cut shorter and more traditional once he’s wearing his costume…

Loretta gave the Mom, Liberdade, just the right type of look, I think.  Not 100% sure about the wire at the back; I might paint this to knock it back a bit.  Have to wait and see, again, once she’s in costume:

Finally, there’s Sabela, with her new ‘do.  Similar to the old one… it’s meant to look like she did it herself.  It’s a little-kid-ponytail.

And here’s Loretta’s fancy toolkit, and Loretta at work.  She’s brushing boiling water on the puppet to try and hold the nylon hair in place.  We later fixed the hair with some glue called “scenic cement” that’s intended for model railroad foliage.  So the up-dos are not coming down — they’re rock solid.

Thanks Loretta — you are a genius!

Instal?  Hair?  Well, I don’t know how else to describe this process.  I did this with both practicality and aesthetics in mind, as usual.  So it’s about 1/10 rooted strands of hair, and 9/10 glued on.  Rooted where you could see the roots, and glued everywhere else.

1. I used these nylon hair extensions made by Easihair.  Nylon works well because it’s heat-resistant, which means you can iron it and style it with boiling water.  (Ouch, poor puppet!)  Real human hair extensions would also work, but of course they’re much more expensive, and somewhat gross, in my opinion.  So to work with these extensions, I had to take out the elastic that the hair is stitched to, splice the lengths of hair apart (they came sewed into 2 layers of hair, one shorter than the other), and iron each length of hair (on the lowest heat setting!) so that it’s straight and easier to work with.
2. Next I painted a “cap” on the puppet’s head where the hair would go, to fill in the scalp with the colour of the hair.  I mixed about 2/3 acrylic paint with 1/3 liquid latex so that it’ll be stretchy, and won’t peel away from the scalp.
3. Here’s what the length of hair looks like once it’s peeled away from the elastic and its other half…
4. I hold the length of hair up to the base of the scalp, and mark the length I’ll need for the base of the scalp.  I stick the trimmed piece on with liquid latex, and work my way up the scalp, one layer at a time… letting the latex cure in between.



5. Here’s the first layer of hair, stuck in at the base of the scalp.
6. Then I add layers about 1 cm apart, wrapping in a horizontal semicircle around the head, to fill in the painted area.  There are about 3-4 semicircular layers on this puppet.
7. Once I get to the top, above where the part would go, I divide the head into 2 halves, adding smaller strips of hair on either side of the part.  I.e. now the strips aren’t semicircles around the head, but rather 2 lines parallel to the part.  I build these layer by layer until the 2 strips are about 5 mm apart, surrounding where I want the part to go.  So for Liberdade, the part is on one side, so there’s one side that has more strips of hair glued in.



8. Now comes the rooting part.  First I made a hair rooting tool out of a medium sized needle.  Using a Dremel tool, I file off the tip of the needle’s eye, making it open at one end, so that it forms a Y shape.
9. I carefully cut apart the strips of hair into strands using an Exacto knife.  Thankfully the way these hair extensions are made, the hair is already in perfectly sized strands, looped at the sewn end.  I carefully insert the loop of hair onto the Y needle tool.
10. Then I jab the hair into the head, strand by strand.  This is pretty hard to do… both because it’s kind of gruesome repeatedly jabbing hair into a human-like head…  but it’s also a delicate task.  I carefully hold the needle in place, with the eye side pointing towards the head, holding the strand of hair, and use pliers to force it into the scalp.  It takes quite a bit of force, which is why I learned to use plumber’s epoxy to reinforce the puppets’ head armatures.  Otherwise the head will lose its shape here.
11. The rooted hair will stick straight up.  As mentioned above, the best way to make nylon hair take on a specific shape is to use heat — in this case, I just pour boiling water over the head (!) and smooth it down into place.  At the end, I do some paint touch-ups, making sure any latex-glue areas are painted over with the hair colour, to mask any strange gobs.

Here she is, with newly rooted and glued hair.  Later she gets a haircut and a special stylin’ ‘do!

Here she is — the Mom… not QUITE finished — still have to paint her hands and finish off some of the sewing…

Other than some minor tweaks, all 4 puppets are now complete!  Woohoo!

Finally!  I’d like to introduce Sabela’s Dad, Xosé Luís.

OK, I’m still getting the hang of this sculpting with nylon stockings.  It’s not as easy as it looks!

I’m just thankful that the little dude will be wearing very heavy clothes to cover up the seams and oddities.  I’m honestly not too sure why I seamed his legs up the front, when he’ll be sitting in a chair…?

I’m very pleased with how his face turned out though; note that he will look a lot less like Geddy Lee once his hair gets cut to a short new ‘do.

And… I’m still sewing her, but here is the Mom, Liberdade, in progress.

I sure hope I haven’t broken any rules of puppetmaking by taking photos of her BEFORE she has eyes!  I realized after that I might be going against the flow here.  But I just couldn’t wait.

The process I used to cast the legs for Sabela is pretty much the same in theory as the one I used to make the head.  Basically I created a latex skin, and filled it with soft Urethane Foam.  You can read all about that final foam casting process for the head here.

Step one to making these legs, which is creating an armature with rare earth magnet feet, is here.

I made the legs a little differently than the head, though.  First, I found the leg mold cavities too narrow to coat with latex while closed, as I had done with the head casting.  So I brush the latex into both halves of the open mold instead.

1. First I added a third strand of armature wire (1/16″) to the 2 that were there before, and twisted them together.  Then I inserted a bit of that 22-gauge jewelry wire (pictured in the rare earth magnets post) into the heat-shrink tubes, and wrapped it around the 3 strands of armature wire.  I’ve learned to add this jewelry wire to all my armatures as a backup for when the main wires break… so I’ll have a little more time with the puppet before I need to replace it.  After the armature’s done, I set it in place inside the mold, and mark off where the heel ends, either side of the knee, and the top of the thigh.  These markings give me an idea where to leave the armature wire free and bendable in the next stage.
2. Once I have the knee, ankle, and hip joint marked off, I fill in these spaces (basically the tibia and fibula / femur bone areas) with plumber’s epoxy, providing solidity to where I don’t want the leg to bend, but leaving the joints open.
3. I remove the armature from the mold, and brush 5 thick coats of liquid latex into the leg cavities.  Each coat needs to dry fully before applying the next.  I try to be careful in the feet, not to build the latex skin up too thickly, or else the armature won’t fit into those areas.
4. Finally, I place the armatures back into the mold.  I brush a very liberal amount of latex on the edge of the molds, onto both halves… making sure to cover both inside the edge AND outside the edge.  This will create a pretty heavy seam on the legs when they’re demolded, but that’s OK — the seams will be removed.  The heavy edge coats just ensure that the halves of the skin will meld together.

Then I bundle it all up with the elastics and that nice yellow strap, and let the whole thing sit for a few days.  There’s not much airflow going into the mold, so this one takes longer to cure than the head does… 3 or 4 days is usually pretty safe.  Then I do the urethane foam casting as described here.

C’est tout!