I’ve created an easy-to-remember URL for our YouTube Channel: http://playhouse.packay.com/. It’s a lot easier to give out to people than “youtube dot com slash channels slash… um, capital U capital C lower-case r capital B lower-case r dash… um…”
I’m also linking here so Google will pick up on the link and increase the pagerank of the channel. Not that my little blog will do much, but every little bit counts.
Well, that’s not entirely true: I’ve helped Kay out with puppets for Shrek and Little Shop, so I’ve been building puppets since Kay and I made Rudy, but this is the second puppet I’m building for me.
It started back in May when we were shopping for material for the puppets for Shrek. Alfred’s Fabric Center in Albany, NY, was going out of business, and they were selling a lot of fabric at half-off. I saw a bolt of bright green fur that didn’t have much left on it, so I brought it up front and told them I’d take all that was left of it. If I recall correctly, it ran $16 and change.
For a few days I thought about what I wanted to make with the green fur, and I decided it was going to be another monster, a little girl this time. Kay and Jen both have little kid characters, and I’m stuck (geez, I’m stuck with a puppet!) playing the adult to everyone else’s little kid, so I wanted to make a younger character to get in on all the fun they’re having.
I decided that I’d name her Violet, because when she was born she had violet fur, but soon afterward the violet fur started falling out and coming in green. She goes by “Vi” now (“call me Violet and you die!”), and she’s just eight years old.
Anyway, over the weekend, Kay cut up some foam using the patterns she used to make Ket, adding some spacers to make the head a little wider. Then she cut up the fur using the same patterns, reminded me how to do the Henson Stitch, and set me to work stitching fur while she crafted arms and a torso.
A partially stitched head, arms and a torso.
It will take at least another week or two for me to stitch up all the fur, especially because I can only do it at home in the evenings, but I’ve told Kay that I really want to do the stitching on Vi myself, mostly because she did so much work on Rudy(she finished up Rudy’s long seams on the sewing machine before she built the foam structure of his head and finished him off) and I want to feel like I did more work on Vi.
So, stay tuned. It may be a little while before I have another update on Vi, but it’ll be worth the wait.
I’m working on the PacKay Productions website today, and it occurred to me that since I’m using git on my desktop to track changes to our WordPress theme, I could also use it to sync changes to my server. Thinking about it, I knew the webserver would be a remote repository, and I could publish my changes by typing “git push web”, but I figured there had to be things I was overlooking, so I hit Google to see what other people had come up with.
That’s when I found “Using Git to manage a web site.” It not only pointed out what I was overlooking–that if I made the website itself a git repository, I’d also be syncing all the .git files into the webroot and possibly exposing them to the public–it also had a solution: using the post-receive hook to deploy changes from a git repository sitting outside the webroot into a directory inside the webroot.
It’s a quick little read. I like it.
My wife came into my office as I was getting ready to go to work this morning to give me bad news: Jerry Nelson had died. Jerry was the third puppeteer Jim Henson hired, after Jerry Juhl (who went on to be the writer for The Muppet Show and Fraggle Rock) and Frank Oz.
We’d known Jerry had basically retired because of his COPD, but he still did work for Sesame Street, recording the voice for his favorite character, Count von Count.
There’s not much I can say. Thank you, Jerry, for a lifetime of entertainment and inspiration.
