Handmade by Computers
Terrible Comfort updates and thinksWe’ve moved our blog to our website!
Hello web adventurers!
We’ve migrated our blog from here to part of our website www.terriblecomfort.com so this blog won’t be updated any longer. We’ll will leave it here as an archived blog, but to continue playing along at home, please pop along to the new site!
Thanks for the company, we look forward to seeing you over at www.terriblecomfort.com
Cheers!
X’s first publicity shoot
OOO… exciting things are happening around here… We’ve cast our Fringe show, X, and we’re very pleased to be able to tell you that we have…
Josh Cameron from Le Garçon Néurotique
Hayley Butcher of Dash and D’Bree fame and last seen on Australia’s Got Talent
Penelope Bartlow, the Artistic Director of Barking Spider Visual Theatre
Danielle Goronszy of Polyglot and Barking Spider
Renee Dudfield from Westside Circus and Eagle’s Nest Theatre
and
Lily and Mike from Terrible COMFORT
What a rocking cast that is! We’re so excited to be working with this incredibly talented people…
We shot the first publicity images last night and we wanted to share a backstage photo… It’s of the irrepressible Lily, in her new coat…
And now with Piratey goodness…
Why does it take pirates so long to learn the alphabet?
Because they can spend years at C!
What did the pirate get when he hit the skeleton?
A skull and very CROSS bones!
What’s the difference between a hungry pirate and a drunken pirate?
One’s a rumbling tummy, and the other’s a tumbling rummy!
Why are we giving you pirate jokes?
It’s not just because we love pirates, or bad jokes, or bad pirate jokes… But we’re here to tell you a very, VERY exciting piece of eight… rem no, I mean an exciting piece of NEWS…
Ready?
Terrible COMFORT is doing a PIRATE PUPPET SHOW at Fringe this year!!!
WHOOOOOOOooooOOOOOooooOOOOOOooooo!
We are SO excited about this… It’s called X, and we’ll give you more details soon, but rest assured, there’ll be heros and villains, battles and treasure, skeletons, pirates, parrots and more…
Want quick updates? Follow us on Twitter, @terriblecomfort and keep an eye on our Facebook page and Flickr for photos and more…
But for now, we’ll leave you to rub your hands in glee and look forward to X. Coming soon to Fringe…
New project – Sal Tax Clothing
Holy nuts! We have been slaving behind the scenes for months to unveil out latest project, Salt Tax clothing. Check out the awesome designs we’ve uploaded over on our RedBubble site. We’re really proud of these designs, we hope you’ll like em as much as we do! http://www.redbubble.com/people/terriblecomfort/portfolio/recent
The Postcard Project
We’ve got an awesome little project going. It came about when I was about to take Dave into the classroom to teach a postcard lesson. My sister was in South Africa at the time and I had this bright idea.
I emailed her to ask her to send Dave a postcard, from his Uncle Sol, with something about Africa. Uncle Sol is out and about in the world, and sends Dave postcards occasionally about things he’s doing or places he’s visited.
The first one came from South Africa…
It reads “Dear Dave the Monkey, Having a lovely time here in Africa. Wish you were here. Love Uncle Sol”
It also came with a letter telling Dave of Uncle Sol’s adventures, seeing lions, being chased by giraffes and being peed on by a tortoise. Unsurprisingly, the kids thought that was hilarious.
Today, another postcard came, this time from London!
It reads “Dear Dave, as you can probably guess, I’m in London this time. It’s cold and grey and the streets are confusing but it’s very ancient and has lots of history. I’m working my way across England washing dishes so a friend wrote this card for me while I’m working. Love your Uncle Sol”
So exciting! We hadn’t heard from Uncle Sol for a while, we were wondering what he was up too!
These postcards are awesome in the classroom for discussing other countries or places, for introducing post card writing, which is shorter and snappier than letter writing (and leads onto an art lesson as the students have to decorate the back of the post cards too!) and an awesome reason to take a puppet to class.
You can read more about the postcard lesson I did with Dave here.
Can’t wait to see where Sol is next!
Because somehow this didn’t make it up the first time
What does puppetry in the classroom look like? This image is really to accompany this post: https://terriblecomfort.wordpress.com/2010/06/07/puppets-in-the-classroom/ but somehow we didn’t load it up at the time.
Our second vlogger!
Introducing Lily,our monster expert.In this vlog she chats about vampires, mermaids, banshees & cthulhu
Tom the Penguphant
Tom is finished! I was really happy with his trunk and ears, which were influenced by observing elephants at the zoo while I was working there.
And, for those of you who wonder, here is a photo of the highly technical design for Tom’s head
Evolution of an idea
Come with us on a visual journey, watching a new show grow from a seed.
The first step is Chuck Norris, the Dort’s pet bunny from Owl In Spotlight. This photo is Chuck in both his forms, big and small. Friends of ours came with their 2 year old daughter to see the show, and she was transfixed by Chuck. At one point in the show when he disappeared off stage, she said “Bye Rabbit!” and once she got home, she spent the next week carrying around a small toy rabbit that she was given at birth but had ignored since then. Clearly she was taken by Chuck. So I decided to knit her a Chuck Norris for Christmas. Then only problem was that neither Chucks had legs and I wanted the toy I knitted to have legs. So I asked people who had seen the show what they imagined Chuck’s legs to look like. The little girl’s father said that he’d envisioned them as long and paisley.
So that’s what I knitted.
When she grows up, I’ll explain to her that this was her dad’s fault.
We were gazing upon the finished paisley Chuck Norris and it occurred to us that it looked like he had bird legs. So I knitted another one, with super long legs in a good birdy orangey-yellow
His name is Aaron.
I had been knitting octopuses for friends and decided that since Aaron was a birdbunny, that I wanted to knit a guy with octopus tentacles and something else on top. Rob suggested a yak. So I knitted a yaktopus.
This is Steven.
By this stage, we had the idea for the new show titled Things That Shouldn’t Be. There are two more main characters, Tom the Penguphant, created while working with children at the zoo and almost finished (he just needs little penguin feet and he’ll be done) and Elise, the monkeyfish, based on the idea of the FeeGee mermaid. which I’ve knitted a prototype 
but we want the tail to be longer and more eel like for the finished guy.
So that’s the story. From puppet to present to weird idea that makes us smile to show.
S
Puppets out in the world of art
I’ve found puppets in education, obviously, and puppets in mental health and I’m currently focused on trying to find artists who build puppets. It seems blindingly obvious to me that puppets are these incredible works of 3d art/craft and yet no one seems to have noticed.
So at the moment, my artist list runs to four.
There’s a photo somewhere of Frida Kahlo performing marionettes for a child. I haven;t been able to find it yet, but it was mentioned in a book I’m reading (The Puppet Show by Ingrid Schaffner and Carin Kuoni. I’ll review it once I’ve finished reading it). Interestingly enough if you do a search of “frida kahlo puppet” you find heaps of people out there that have made puppets or dolls of Kahlo. Again it’s a example of fans making dolls and puppets out of the things they adore. Weird and worth looking into it further… But I digress.
IN that same book it talks about one of Jackson Pollack’s paintings has a figure cut out of it, he made a marionette and then cut a covering for it out of the painting. You can see a copy here.
There’s also Paul Klee, who made around 50 hand puppets for his son Felix over about a 9 year period, also Klee never thought of them as art and never included them in any catalog of his work. There’s a photo from the exhibition here and you can see the self portrait puppet Klee made here.
And I went to the Mirka Mora exhibition at Heide which had a couple of newspaper articles included and one mentioned her love of dolls and puppets. It’s very hard to find anything else about it on the net though. Her love of dolls is mentioned as fact but I can’t find interviews with her or anything talking about either. But then I find this site saying “For the 1988 Bicentennial festivities at the Sydney opera House, she designed 85 five-foot-high puppets on plywood, all painted with oil for the opera, “Bennelong,” about the Aboriginal man of the same name who befriended Captain Phillip” . I can’t find any photos of them though. However I did find this gorgeous photo of her clutching dolls she made in her studio with more behind her. I suspect since I can’t find anything else that she didn’t make a lot of puppets as her work, but nice to know she did make some.
That’s my list so far. But I look forward to adding to it further. Love the detective work!
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