Category Archives: Skipton Puppet Festival

More shadow puppets for Little Red Riding Hood story take shape

Posted on by Collette Knowles
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This is another update on the progress so far on the “Fairytales of Wit, Wisdom & Witchcraft” show.

After trying out all of the puppets that I have made so far with the Over-Head Projector and shadow screen I have been working out what extra puppets are needed to tell the stories. In many cases it is different sizes and arrangements of puppets I’d already made. You can see from the pictures that what I have been working on were larger scale articulated versions of Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf which are to be used directly against the screen itself rather than on the flat bed of the OHP. I have also created a large scale head for Little Red Riding Hood to talk to the wolf, with an articulated mouth, (this is for the “Ooo Grandma what big eyes you’ve got” scene).

We have also decided to make two versions of the show, firstly a 30 minute version that I can do by myself which will feature “Little Red Riding Hood”, “The 3 Billy Goats Gruff” and “The Enormous Turnip” and an hour long version which will use two puppeteers (myself and Tim Austin) which will include the other three stories as well (“Goldilocks”, “The Frog Prince” and “Chicken Licken”).

Please feel free to leave a comment or a question about the puppets and how they are made. 😊

Please take a look at my WHERE YOU CAN SEE ME page for info. about free shadow puppet making workshop and shadow puppet suitcase performances at Skipton Puppet Festival coming up Sunday 19th of October.

Fun at Skipton Puppet Festival

Posted on by Collette Knowles
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Since going to Upfront for Jack and the Beanstalk; I also took them to Skipton Puppetry Festival as well. Miranda and Anthony were both very taken with the Punch & Judy show by Clive Chandler. They kept talking about Mr. Punch and asking where he is and what was he doing? I decided to get them a set of soft children’s Punch & Judy puppets which they have been having great fun with ever since. They have Punch, Judy, a Policeman and a Crocodile in the set and they have not fought over them, as I feared they might, but have played very nicely with them and they get up to all sorts of things. Sadly, the crocodile does not have a mouth that opens and the sausages are attached to Mr. Punch’s hand but they manage to do a lot with them despite the physical limitations, (imagination is a wonderful thing).

  • Clive keeps the crowd entertained before the start of the main show…

They also saw Noisy Oyster again performing their shows “Dangerous Dave”(which Anthony did find a bit traumatic) and the “Da Silva Circus” which was, (of course) excellent and we were very kindly given a behind the scenes tour by Nik Palmer and Sarah Rowland-Barker. They remembered me from my performance at Beverley Puppet Festival (which was lovely considering that’s quite a few years back now). It was also lovely to see Liz Lempen (and her equally talented sister) again though as we were all masked up at the time we didn’t see quite as much of each other as usual!

There is more puppetry at Skipton this weekend so do check it out: “A November Day” by Thingumajig Theatre at 8pm and “Woodland Tales with Grandad” by Pickled Image at 11am and 2pm.