Since I know you like process shots, I took pictures the other day when I was hastily constructing the pencil-necked little weasel. For those who missed the whole thing, a politician in Minnesota called multiple-award winning author Neil Gaiman a pencil-necked little weasel, accused him of being a thief and said that he hated him. It was very grade-school. But it prompted lots of joking about pencil-necked little weasels. Paul Cornell suggest that I should make one. It didn’t take much to make me head down to the basement. I started with a rough side view on paper to get the scale right.
Then I wadded up a ball of tinfoil around a pencil for the head. Note: I’m taking a billion shortcuts making this.
I used plumber’s epoxy to build up eyes and a basic face structure. The pencil that is sticking out of the tinfoil will eventually become the pencil-necked little weasel’s nose. After this photo, I went back and added a more defined snout. Once the epoxy was set, I painted the eyes with black acrylic and a gloss gel medium.
I rolled a tube of fur from a scrap of white fake fur I had in the basement and whip-stitched the back onto it.
Weasels, just so you know, are basically a tube of fur with a head and tiny little legs.
I considered glue, because I was building fast, but decided not to cheat that much because it would have made the tube too stiff. I did glue fur to the head, however, because that wasn’t going to require any flexibility.
This is the head in the pre-trimmed state, and looks like a giant ball of fuzz, with an eraser sticking out of it.
Here I’m double-checking the length of the neck pencil against the drawing. It’s just glued into the fur at top and bottom, which gives a little bit of flexibility.
If I were building this for real, I would have built a slightly more robust neck joint.
The legs are just fur and hot glue for structure. Neat trick: you can use hotglue to deliberately stiffen fabric or leather by flooding an area with glue and then molding it into shape as it cools. Makes great noses that way.
And here’s the finished pencil-necked little weasel, complete with eraser nose and pencil tail.
This was a fun thing to make.
If I’d planned for this to be a puppet, I would have put a control rod on the thing somewhere. The smart thing to do would have been to run the snout pencil all the way out the back of the head and use that as a control.
Ah well. It’s a cute toy and was a great deal of fun to make.
Also, it justified those scraps of fur I’ve been keeping in our storage locker.
As usual, fantastic. The eraser-for-a-nose is a particularly good touch!
Thank you! I was pleased with how that turned out.
Will we be using it in whatnot?
It kinda begs for it, doesn’t it?