The Pinpillar

As Rana sits in the light of dusk in her cozy easy chair, with her stitching on her lap, we will see a large, striped, pincushion caterpillar slowly making its way up the arm of the chair toward her sewing box to offer his black-topped tailor pins.

This was a spontaneous addition to the cottage puppets, easily and quickly executed. It went from notion--seeing a hotdog shaped pincushion I had made looking like a caterpillar--to the installed critter in less than a day. upper left is the real life pincushion and a photo of a pillar along with the nubbly wooly shaped I'd sewn for something else on the project and abandoned. Below that, you see the progress after adding small dollops of crackle gel onto the heads of many 1/2" gold sequin pins, after painting them glossy black and securing each one into the wired shape with glue. I striped him after the fact with permanent marker which I do realize is the hard way as I had to touch up the pins afterward. But it was only after seeing him covered in pins that I saw he needed more cheer and color. He needed to read more like a caterpillar as well as a pin cushion. The stripes did that for me.

He attaches to the upholstered chair via matching-headed long needles as tie-downs (in silver so I can find them while animating him crawling.)

When we enter the cottage we will see him curled up in Rana's sewing basket on her chairitable. Then the next time you see him, he'll be moving on the chair. It's a small touch but it adds quite a lot of depth to the scenes. It adds to whatever is behind the other decorative pins in Rana's sewing kit which are made of ladybugs and flies as well as pearls and jewels. It adds another creature that is half organic/half inanimate; things that look like other things, etc.

And making it prompted me to have to actually install the other sewing kit on the arm of the chair, which included gluing in each of those pins as well. And sewing the shell box onnto the chair with thread that I then painted over to match where it lay. I had to stiffen up all the dangling threads on both settings and fasten them down.

I can count on one hand the number of things left to do in the cottage before it is ready to begin shooting its scenes.