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.