Step the First, Gather Your Troops.

If you are joining this post for the first time, I am going through how we went about building a Punch and Judy set. That’s what I’m doing whether your joining us now or not so I don’t know why I mention it to be honest. More background is available here.

As I mentioned in before, I have no woodcarving skills, this is a big handicap if you wish for a set of wooden headed puppets, as I do. What then are the options? Pay someone to make a set? Although there are many beautiful ones out there, each and everyone is, unfortunately, out of my budget. A cackhanded attempt at making my own? I have too much respect for the trees. So I had to source some cheap wooden heads from somewhere, but where?

Thankfully I have been here before, last year when I was trying to make some mediaeval puppets for Samhain the success or otherwise of which can be found in the other blog over here. So I had a starting point. Germany.

They still make toys in Germany in a way that we don’t seem to anymore. Consequently where you might buy a set of plastic Punch and Judy puppets for children in this country, in Germany you get a wooden set of Kasperletheater puppets for not much more. (And a good exchange rate at the time of purchase didn’t hurt either!)

Once the puppets arrived I knew they would be for the most part clothed inappropriately and painted inappropriately. So consequently had to make a hard decision and, well there’s no delicate way of putting this… I had to rip their heads off. I didn’t actually think that this would be a easy thing to do but you know what? Once I got going I rather enjoyed it! It is very therapeutic recommend it to anyone. Eventually they looked pretty much like my very own Traitors Gate…

Traitors gate in miniature

As you can see two of the heads have already been repainted by the time this photo was taken. And I’m sure you can guess who they are. As for the rest, stay tuned as we go through them one at a time.