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Making a puppet stage. Storing your puppets.
Where to buy puppet supplies in Australia?

A while ago I posted an article which discussed four puppetry websites you’ll want to keep bookmarked. Now I’m presenting a list of websites which offer useful converters and generators that will help you make your puppets, sets and costumes. There’s everything from measurement converters to online printable rulers, and even some sites that are just plain handy for other reasons. The most interesting ones are at the bottom…

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There is a free ebook on the web entitled You can make puppet costumes. I have used this book for everything from muppet-type puppet costumes, to designing and making clothes for rod puppets.

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Today there was an interesting discussion over at Theatre Australia about finding the cheapest and best venue to hire for their self-produced show. As we discussed the topic, I realised that it would be really handy to have a checklist of stuff that you should ask when choosing a venue. Having needed to help friends - and my own productions - work out what space would work best for us, I recalled the number of times we went venue hunting and having a list of questions needing answers. So with that in mind, I spent some time typing up a list of questions you should ask yourself when looking for the right venue. It covers some 100 or so things you should be thinking about when looking to hire a space. Most of it will apply to touring as well, though it’s written in mind for one-off seasons in a stable indoors venue; there’s list of Aussie venues below.

As with my puppet commission checklist, I offer up my venue questionnaire as 

An Excel file or PDF

for free and under the same creative commons licence (attribution only). If there’s anything there that you think should be added, please let me know and I’ll update the file.

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This is about screens not the puppets themselves. For info on the materials for the puppets, go here.

I’ve been getting a couple of emails lately about the different types of fabrics used in shadow puppet screens. As in my tutorial [link to be added], I discuss predominantly using silk (or bisilk, which is cheaper). So I thought I’d post my responses here for everyone else to read too. This is probably the beginning of a new category of articles: ‘your questions answered’. I’ll not go out of my way to seek questions, but if you do email me, I might just put the answer here (which isn’t to say I’ll not reply to your email of course). Names and personal info removed/changed and posted with permission of the author. Questions are in block quotes, my response is below.

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