There’s quite a number of big things happening at the moment that I’ve either missed out on posting previously (ie. needing to catch up on), or have just been announced. So for the next couple of days, forgive me if I do some repetitive posts in terms of being about similar things. I’m probably going to establish a monthly or bi-monthly events ‘dump’ so that I can keep up with all the latest news from UNIMA Australia and various shows I’ve been hearing about.

So a summary of what’s coming up: a whole bunch of live puppetry things are happening nowadays, with several workshops (and one big one that’s going to be something everyone will want to do) and live performances. There’s a number of shows going on in Australia, plus some big news from Gary Friedman about a trip to Kenya. 

Not only that, but on Friday, I should have a review of the Aussie Avenue Q; I’ve gotten an invite from the producers thanks to my little interview. It should be good, I’m going with my good friend and puppetry-company-cofounder, Jeany. Neither of us have seen it before, so it will be nice to finally see what everyone’s been raving about. 

In other news, I’ve been steadily working on a new design layout for the shopping system - which will really just link to etsy and whatever site I’ll sell the patterns from. I got pretty far into the design and was somewhat happy with how things looked, when Andrew from PuppetVision gave me some feedback that I really have to think about now. It’s not bad, just that he made a lot of good suggestions that I’m either going to have to commit a lot of time to do, or find someone willing to do it for me. (PS. If you’re reading this, thanks Andrew, it’s actually changed a lot of my perceptions about the design of the site)

Plus, on Saturday I had an extremely good trip on the latest Op Shop Tour, where me and my mum had fun hunting for toys. I actually had a purpose: hunting for two very specific items for a commission, which are expensive to find in local stores but cheap in op shops. It was a rather pot luck affair, and on our second stop we found something useable, but not quite right in terms of size and character; the last shop we found the perfect item. We did however also find a pretty awesome collectibles store near one of our stops, which had a very strange and horrible collection of glove puppets (I’m not kidding, some were just McDonald’s style toy glove puppets, but others were grotesque papier mache jobs, something that would quite easily scare a child watching 50s TV shows) and two ventriloquist dolls. I’ll post more about that store later.