Starting the Gingerbread man:

Thursday 6th & Friday 7th April

As this was a bit of a larger task me and Kerry decided to tackle it together as we both have different skills in this area and we thought that we could have a better result if we worked as a team. We were originally looking at making the gingerbread man out of polystyrene and then painting it, however we though that felt would have a nicer look and a softer/safer feel to him. It would also mean that it would have more flexibility when the hand is controlling the mouth. We brought felt in brown, white, blue and we brought red and purple in the fabrics that we could find in the appropriate colours. On the way to university on Thursday I came across a Polystyrene box with a lid that I thought would be perfect for a lid and decided to bring this in, the others liked the look of this. We could then start working on him.

Me and Kerry decided that we were going to have a joint effort to make the gingerbread man puppet. I started by drawing out the initial shape to then cut out in felt. The bottom of the two legs will be separate and then look as if they are joined to the body with icing lines.

After cutting all the bits of felt out, I cut and stuck some foam board onto the felt shape, this was about 2cm smaller, we were originally going to have it so that it was curved all around, but I thought that having a flatter bottom would not only make it easier to attach to the tray when it was finished but would also make it more cookie like, as they would have a flat bottom once they have been cooked, and flattened out. I also cut out all of the shapes for the icing in foam board ready to cover in foam and stuff.

Meanwhile, Kerry was putting together the feet, she glued the top layer of the foot to the bottom bit with the foam board in with a thin layer of glue, as she went around she left a small opening, in which she could put the stuffing in and make it as full as possible.

Kerry then wrapped the edges round and stuck them down with hot glue, these would all be secured onto the tray, this meant that they wouldn't be seen and it wouldn't matter as much if it wasn't too neat.

These are the two finished legs, stuffed and ready to be decorated.

After doing the legs, Kerry sewed together the body of the gingerbread man, including a sleeve inside the mouth to hide the mechanism, she then used the same method as the feet to stuff and secure round the edges. I made the mouth as shown here, I cut the shape in one piece from a piece of foam board and used the same technique as Kerry to create a tight shape around the foam board, stuffing around as I go.

I then repeated the same process with white felt for all of the icing pieces, the important part of this process was to pull the fabric really tight in order to keep to the shape of the foam board, this means that it will look similar when stuffed

This is another angle of my stuffing the icing piece. I used a paintbrush's other end to poke the stuffing in and ensure it went right up to all of the edges.

This is all of the puppet pieces, aside from the buttons and mouth. They will be secured down once the tray is finished.

For the tray I used the lid from a polystyrene box. It had an unwanted rid which I cut out with a scalpel.

Next, I covered the entire thing front to back in gum strip, this was to create a protective barrier from the polystyrene. I talked to Abby about what we could coat this in, once try that would allow us to sand it. We couldn't think of anything that would allow us to get it smooth enough for it to look like metal. So we decided that it would be best to get a plastic sheet and vacuum form it.

Conor took it to be vacuum formed, but sadly it was at a temperature that was too high and melted the polystyrene, this caused the edges to go like this. We decided that we would have to start again and cut the bottom of the box off that the original lid had come from and we will use this to cast on at a lower temperature and hopefully it will have a better result.