Felting and Fiber Studio

I have made quite a number of props for various productions put on by my local amateur dramatics society SNADS and they usually get used.  However, because of one thing and another, there are some that ended up “in the bin”.

Last February our pantomime was Aladdin.  It was the version which has a genie of the ring as well as the genie of the lamp.  The ring belongs to Abanaza, the baddie, and when it is rubbed the genie appears.

The script did not indicate what type of ring it was – finger/ear/curtain/boxing/circus – though the former was probably what was meant.  It was felt that a finger ring would not be seen by the audience and, since this was a pantomime not a play, and “over the top” was the order of the day, we’d make it big enough for the back row to see it.  It was to be bangle size.

I showed the production team a page of different types of ring for them to decide what the ring should look like.  The director chose the ring with the dragon’s eye.

To begin with I decided to use a wooden curtain ring as the base but it soon occurred to me that unless I used glue I would find it very difficult to safely attach a glass dragon’s eye to it.  Glue is always a last resort in stage props or costume because if it is going to fail it will do it in mid performance, sod’s law being what it is.

So it had to be textile based so that I could sew everything to it.  I used some scrap felt “moulded” into a circle and wrapped it with strips of the non-woven cotton cloths that I tend to use for just about anything these days.  The felt and cloth together would keep the shape I needed by the time I’d finished with it.

I had researched glass eyes but could not find exactly what I wanted that could easily be affixed to the ring so in the end I decided to use one of the Fimo eye blanks I had made some time ago.  They had short pieces of pipe cleaners embedded in the back to help with fixing.  I did use an image of one of the glass eyes as reference for painting the Fimo eye, which I did with acrylic paints, glitter glue, glitter nail varnish topped with several coats of clear nail varnish.

I attached the eye to the ring with the pipe cleaner and then stitched the pipe cleaner to the ring to make sure it stayed there.  I added a piece of scrap felt around the eye in the shape of the edge of eyelids which I stiffened with PVA glue, at the same time adding the glue to the rest of the ring.  After a couple more coats of PVA had dried I set about decorating the rest of the ring.

The original design of the ring was somewhat “steam punk” so I fished out some chains from my stash, some lengths of threaded black bugle beads and some wires.  I also found some gold cord and, pinching an idea from Lyn which she showed us in one of her posts, I wrapped some wire around the cord so that I’d be able to bend it to my will.

The silver chain I used mainly to surround the eye, and wrapped the rest of the ring with the black chain, the gold cord, with and without wire wrapping, and the black beads.

The gaps of the ring showing between the wrappings I painted with a couple of coats of silver, bronze and gold metallic acrylic paints and there we have it.

I delivered this to the rehearsal space and a couple of weeks later, when they got as far as rehearsing the scene in which Abanaza would remove the ring from wherever he was wearing it and hand it to Aladdin, it was decided that it would have to be a finger ring after all (and we had plenty of those “in stock”).  So now the ring is hanging on my bedroom wall.

The other props that I have made that didn’t get used were intended for a play entitled “Chase me Up Farndale Avenue S’il vous plait”.  I don’t know if any of you have heard of the Farndale Avenue Townswomen’s Guild productions – they are plays within plays.  I think it likely that the original “Play that went Wrong” was based on these.  Anything that could go wrong did, of course.  This latest production was to take place in May 2022 and the main thing that went wrong was that it wasn’t performed after all – various problems mounted up and it was decided not to proceed with it.  By that time, with sod’s law still operating, most of the props that were my responsibility had been made.

The three main things that I needed to make were a vacuum cleaner, a paper bag of baking flour, and an iced cake.

“Simples” do I hear you say?  Well the flour bag falls open at the bottom on being picked up, and lets loose a load of flour.  The cake gets trodden on during the play but was sufficiently intact to be offered to someone to eat.  As far as the vacuum cleaner was  concerned, it had to look like a Hoover Junior, which does (or rather, did,) have a distinctive appearance.

I actually make my own bread so have ready access to paper flour bags.  When I had emptied one of these, I carefully opened the bottom of it.  Using some white polystyrene, I made a “pile of flour” shape that would fit inside the bag.  I smoothed off the polystyrene and gave it a coat of PVA glue and some of my non-woven white cotton fabric.  When that was dry and placed inside the refolded bag, I added a little loose flour – enough to be seen to puff up when the bottom opened, but not enough to cover the stage in it.  I had also asked Mr Google for a suitable image which I could manipulate so that I could paste a recognisable baking flour design over the bread flour image on the bag.  It would have been quicker to just write “Cake Flour” in large letters and if we had been producing a pantomime that’s what I would have done.  However a play requires a little more verisimilitude.

Next the vacuum cleaner.

Not surprisingly, no-one had a Hoover Junior to lend us, so I had to do my best to made a cordless electric carpet sweeper look like one.  All that there was to the carpet sweeper was a base with the brushes in it on the end of a pole/handle.

So I found an old fabric bag of about the correct size and colour to replicate the dust bag and suspended this from the handle on some string attached to a slide-on plastic filing bar.  The bottom was gathered onto a plastic ring and attached to the top of the cardboard mock up of the hoover body which was affixed to the sweeper body with masking tape.  My husband produced a length of cable with a plug on one end.  The cable was secured down the handle and onto the mock up body, again with masking tape.  Google had kindly supplied me with an image of a Hoover Junior (complete with adoring housewife thanking her kind husband for the present!) from which I was able to obtain a print out of the Hoover logo and also the appropriate font for the word Hoover.

The letters of the word were affixed to the “dust bag” and the logo to the mock-up of the body of the cleaner.

Unfortunately I didn’t take any photos of the completed cleaner, or any of the stages of construction, but it would look sufficiently like a Hoover Junior when viewed from the auditorium.

Finally the cake.  Since we manage, during panto rehearsals, to empty quite a few of the round tubs of chocolates that abound around Christmas we usually use one of these to represent a cake.  Turning it upside down we paint it white, or whatever colour the icing is supposed to be and stick on pretend cream or icing decorations.  We actually had one in stock, well it was a work in progress, the tub base/cake top had been painted, but the sides were awaiting completion.  All I had to do was insert a size 9 footprint.

Mr Google (what did we do BG?) gave me an image of a suitable footprint and I enlarged it to the appropriate size, printed it out and, using it as a template, cut out the footprint shape from the surface of the “cake”.  I then stuck the printed foot print onto that piece of plastic and, using stiff white paper, suspended the footprint below the hole in the cake surface, to replicate the damage that treading on the cake did to it.

The lid of the sweet tub aka the bottom of the cake

The footprint from underneath.

Someone’s size 9’s in the cake

I would then have painted over the cake again, including the sides this time, but by this time the powers that be had decided that the production would not go ahead.

So the cake was binned, the Hoover dismantled and the flour bag put into storage, and we all went home!