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 This is my least favorite part of the process. It is the very definition of the word tedious. It’s so dull, I don’t even want to write a post about it, but here I go.
Because the dog is supposed to be a springer spaniel, it calls for two colors of fur, each of which comes in different lengths and textures. After looking for the right material, I finally settled on goat fur for the white and human hair wig for the black. The hair comes in packages like this and has a wave to it.
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 Each section looks like this when unpacked and is about three feet long.
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 You can see how I have to place each line of brown fur. I’ll admit that I started out sewing this on, which is the right way, and after awhile realized that a) it would take me forever and b) the dog wasn’t going to do enough movement on stage for me to worry about stability. So I glued the rest of it.
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 Here she is with most of the brown fur installed.
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 The white fur went faster, since it was basically goat hide and so I could do it in large pieces.
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 This is the dog with untrimmed fur.
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 Here’s where I’ve begun trimming and all that fur on the floor is what I’ve cut off. The biggest challenge here is to make it look like it’s naturally short, rather than trimmed. You know the difference, right? I mean, when you see a short haired dog you can tell when it’s naturally that way versus one that’s obviously been to the groomers. The way I do that is by using a straight razor instead of sheers. It lets me trim the fur with a little less regularity and gives it a more natural look.
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 And here she is with ears and mostly trimmed. After I took this, I went back and trimmed her legs to create the fetlocked appearance of a springer spaniel, but you get the idea.
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I can see how it would be a problem to make the hair look naturally that length. Looks good from here. It doesn’t look cut.
My dog sleeps just like that last picture. Well, maybe a bit less stiff. 🙂
When she’s onstage, she breathes. Until she dies, that is.
You seem to be making a lot of dying dogs lately. Doesn’t anybody need living dogs anymore? 🙂
Apparently not! Although, the interesting thing about this trend is that each dog is progressively less dead.
First dog = road kill.
Second dog = Badly wounded, dies on stage.
Third dog = Sick, explores house, dies on stage.
Some day, maybe I’ll build a dog that survives the play.
As a note, the cross-posts of blog entries from here to LJ are having troubles due to some messed-up HTML being generated. So LJ followers are missing out on the very impressive photos and info. That’s some astounding work there – wow!
– yeff
Thanks. I’ve got that fixed now.
The LJ issue is certainly solved…
I was scrolling my Friends page (upward, to get messages in chronological order) and thought, “Who the heck is sharing pictures of a dead dog!?!? …. Oh, of course!”
It’s very convincing!
Ha! Excellent, my work here is done.
Is the theater so small that you couldn’t use fake fur?
It would have been easier, but I couldn’t find any in the right texture, color and length.
Ancient puppets! I came across this science article and thought you might be interested. You are part of a tradition that may be far older than you thought. 🙂
http://scienceblogs.com/afarensis/2008/09/03/learn_something_new_every_day/
THAT is very cool.