Dressing the Pasty Child Puppet

After George had finished constructing the armature of the pasty child puppet and coating it in a layer of latex for the skin, he handed the pasty child body over to me to make her a bit more decent! The intended 'look' for the pasty child was almost like a sailor theme (to go with the Cornish elements of the film)with a stripey jumper and blue skinny jeans. To start making the jumper, I cut out sections of a red stripey toddler's sock that I measured out using the body as a guide. It was a bit fiddly trying to measure the arms because they are quite long and the sock itself wasn't long enough to cover up the exposed K&S brass tubing that held the hands in place. To hide these, I cut out sections of red fabric to extend the sleeves and also another piece to make the jumper have a turtle-neck to cover up the exposed K&S on the neck as well. Once all the pieces of the jumper were cut, I moved on to cutting out sections of 'jeans' fabric, once again using the body as a measuring tool. The trousers had to be measured accurately (long enough to cover the ankle K&S, but short enough to show the fantastic mini converse boots that George made for the pasty child!)Now that all the clothes pieces were measured and cut, I could start putting them onto the armature. It was fairly easy because I could simply glue the sections together over the body with a special fabric glue instead of sewing which would have been time-consuming (though I did have to take care to tuck in any frayed corners.)

I could glue the clothes straight onto the puppet's body because we were going to be using a few bodies during filming as the aluminium wire in the armature tends to weaken and snap over time (George has already made a few spare bodies so I can just quickly dress one of those if an arm falls off!) It was quite fiddly at times trying to make the clothes look neat and realistic, and making the sleeves fit the arms was a bit tricky! But I am happy with the finished result, here are some piccies of the finished dressed pasty child puppet: