I had by now hoped to post images of my first new shadow puppet of the year, as it will be sold. If you remember, I’d mentioned I had tried polyprop, then moved back to document folders. I liked the latter material so much, that I decided to find out what plastic they use for document folders. It turns out that it’s what I started off with: polypropylene. The sheets I got though were too thick to cut out easily, which is why I moved away from it. However, since I looked into suppliers for this plastic I decided to go back to my list and rethink it. There were two suppliers who I looked into where it seemed like they sold the right product. One is in Queensland, making shipping quite expensive, although their price per sheet was reasonable: but they were also quite snotty in response to my basic questions.

The other is a Victorian based company, Megara. I liked the fact that they offer translucent and opaque sheets, but also are environmentally friendly. Their plastics are recyclable! I contacted them and got a quote, and found good rates - shipping is also fairly cheap ($30 for orders under $300 or thereabouts). I put in an order and got a huge shipment of plastic sheets.

Which leads me to my point: I ordered sheets which were the thinnest I could get. The last batch from a different supplier (they only had one thickness) was too thick. And it was 0.8mm (0.03 inches) thick. The thinnest from Megara is 0.38mm, with the next one up being 0.6mm. Hedging my bets, I went with the thinnest, hoping that 0.6mm was also too thick.

When the shipment arrived, I discovered that light and sturdy as the plastic is, at that thickness it’s also extremely floppy. The only way to store them is to lie them flat on my desk. Fortunately the paper wrapping it came in provides an excellent background for any photos I take for tutorials and patterns. Unfortunately, the thickness is presenting its own problems.

When I upscaled the pattern for the design last time, it turned out that the hollow head became floppy. In order to prevent this issue, I simply relocated the rods and that took care of that. But I still wasn’t happy about size, and so when I got my new plastic sheets I thought I’d resize again. I’ve tried three different sizes now, and the one at which I’m the happiest at using, is also the one which has the most floppiness. Even the smaller sizes are causing the head to deform when holding it up. The combined weight of the bottom pieces of the puppet and the hollowness of the head create a considerable distortion to the design. And this is nothing to say of the fact that further articulation and the weight of additional brads also cause further sagging.

I am left with two options: redesign the head - either by filling in the hole or making the oval shape thicker - or keep the puppet at a smaller size. Neither of which I’m happy with. A third option is obtaining some thicker plastic sheets in the hopes that the slight addition of bulk will help keep the puppet in shape - the document folders are only slightly thicker than the new sheets.

This is frustrating me a lot because I’m ready to move on and start building these puppets; but each day I try something new to solve the problem and only get set back again.

What makes things worse is that I requested some info from the supplier about something else, towards the end of December. I hadn’t expected a reply straight away, seeing as how most people were on holidays, and I didn’t. But I did receive a reply at the start of the month, explaining the delay and stating they’d have answers for me shortly. I’ve been waiting three weeks, with a prompting email from me about a week or so ago. This is hamstringing me further as the first puppet I want to produce and sell is completely reliant on the answers to my questions.

At this rate, I’ll be surprised if I have anything new to showcase by March.

Before I get into the details of the sale, I wanted to inform readers of Puppets in Melbourne that commenting has now been fixed on the blog page. As explained on School of Puppetry, the issue was with the comments form allowing URLs to be submitted. A chat with my host reveals that they will not allow an exception for a security program that prevents people adding website links to comments, in order to avoid hackers, viruses, etc. This was not a problem with my previous host, and though there may be a way around this issue, for the time being I’ve simply removed the field from the form; at least now the comments are working. There are still a couple of minor bugs to fix, but fortunately shouldn’t be things most people will notice. This completes the work on the redesign of the site, minus a few tweaks here and there to make categories of posts easier to follow.

… Now on to the fun stuff.

In the past I used Etsy to post my shadow puppets for sale. It took care of the majority of work processing orders. However, as the last of my sales listings there have come to an end, and I’m moving on to other, better designs, I thought it was time to get rid of the final puppets I have in stock. There are 3 turtle shadow puppets, 2 jellyfish, 1 seahorse, and 3 starfish.  As it’s a clearance sale, all of them are 50% off! All relevant info, with pics, video and pricings can be found at the links above. Mainly I just want to move old stock out of the house; and as I’m not planning on making them ever again, this is your last chance at buying one! Or it could be considered a collector’s item… Go check them out!

In 2008, UNIMA, the international organisation for puppeteers, held their regular Congress. Lasting 10 days, the Congress is a ‘by puppeteers, for puppeteers’ festival, which included a number of events for the public as well. The 2008 Congress was held in Perth, Australia. I attended and blogged my experiences, which included workshops, shows, forums, exhibitions and keynote speakers.

For ease of navigation around my blog, I give you an itinerary (one wasn’t posted originally).

• Winning a travel grant
• Day 1: Arrival
• Day 2: Bunraku building & BBQ
• Day 3: More bunraku and Z is for Giraffe
• Day 4: More bunraku
• Day 5: Last of the bunraku, Cross cultural forum and Diva
• Day 6: Carnival Day, Flea Circus, and Chiryu Karakuri
• Day 7: Visual Narrative workshop, Shadow Puppets workshop and Explosion Therapy
• Day 8: Sightseeing, Animating Spark forum and Puppet Sports
• Day 9: Neville Tranter workshop, Petr Matasek keynote speech, POFA intro and Sleeping Beauty
• Day 10: World of Paper workshop
• Day 11: Solo Journeys forum, Mechanics Alive exhibition, The Arrival, and Fatal Attraction
• Day 12: Last minute shows, Bradshaw’s Shadows and Angel
• Day 13: Leaving, Congress highlights, show rankings

Related: The showcase of the bunraku head, which I couldn’t finish until I got home • Pics & video of The Arrival, posted after the fact • Photos of the trip

A few big things are coming this way… I’ve completed the majority of design updates for Puppets in Melbourne - but I wouldn’t hold my breath on them never changing again, as I seem to be constantly redesigning. At least this time it wasn’t a redesign so much as a reworking of a previous one to include more colours and a move of the menu location.

Where I left off, I had just completed the home page, gallery, and about page. I’ve now finished off the rest: the policies page, contact page, and search. The blog page is 90% completed, and I’ll get back to that in a minute.

As explained last time, the majority of work is simply updating the original design, and so there’s not much different about the above pages. The search page has an additional feature, which is a search box. Even though you can search from anywhere and the search page is technically ‘hidden’ (ie. not reachable through the menu), I find a lot of people click the submit button on the search form without actually inputting any text. This results in a blank search page and naturally, confuses people. So I’ve added the extra form just in case.

The blog page is my main struggle. As readers of School of Puppetry will have seen, I recently turned off comments there; and did it here at PIM as well. Why? Well, initially I thought it had been because I upgraded the PIM blog software (but not the SOP one) and thought I’d broken something in an updated skin file. But apparently with the new version of the blog, the form is using Ajax, a particular type of code which means no reloading of pages due to form submissions. That’s all well and good, but it didn’t work on my site: fortunately there is an option to use the old commenting system. Unfortunately, that refuses to work either. Scouring the error logs I discovered some odd errors and asked for help, but it seems like the error is not a usual one and it seems likely that commenting has been broken on both sites for the past 6 months. I just rarely get comments and didn’t notice the difference. (Which is a great lesson for running your own website: every so often you should test forms to see if they work) Even more unfortunate is that in trying to resurrect the commenting, is that in replacing edited files with originals ends up breaking and effectively defacing the contact page. Sigh…

Though commenting still needs to be fixed, the rest of the blog is functional. Again, most of it is merely adjusting colours and things, although I’ve made some minor changes to areas that were bugging me. No links on blog titles from a category page, which means you have to click on the ‘leave a comment’ link in order to view the blog post itself. That bugged me. Not having the category/tags/share button at the top of the post bugged me. The next/previous blog post overlapped if the text was too long; now fixed. I’ve re-added the related posts block at the bottom of each blog post, and added in a latest blog post block as well. Lastly, instead of having Twitter/Facebook/etc widgets at the footer of the blog, they’re now in the sidebar.

Scrolling past the list of categories and archive links you’ll now find a short selection of my latest tweets, a ‘like me on facebook’ widget, what I’m currently reading (hint: which will be relevant for future posts), a subscribe link for my Youtube account, and something fun…

A selection of my favourite shadow puppet videos found on Youtube. There’s some really great ones in there, including videos of wayang kulit and Chinese shadow puppets being made, some performances, and a wonderful ad produced on TV a while ago.

In between trying to solve the commenting issue, I will be working on a series of draft blog posts on a topic that will start Puppets in Melbourne down the road towards introducing the ‘new look’, and will get back into building. I have lots to do this year, and am already wondering how I’m going to work it all into a proper schedule.