I should catch you up on what’s happening with the colon puppet.

After I gave up on finding the part that the bandsaw flung across the room, I got a new tea-strainer spoon to dismantle. While I’d normally mill my own parts, this was already the perfect shape, so hey, why make work for myself?

I used a doubled length of aluminum armature wire to provide the internal shape of the colon. This is a decision that may come back to bite me. I wanted the wire to be flexible enough that I could get it through the opening in the jar but stiff enough that it won’t reshape randomly on its own. In theory, this will work, but I might have to stiffen it further after the colon is in the jar.

Here you can see the “mech” itself.

I’ve mounted it to the aluminum with plumber’s putty. It’s great stuff that is basically a two part epoxy. It gets almost metal hard and is good for adding stability to structures.

The dark band going around the ball is a band of elastic cord. At the moment this is stitched in place, but once I get the whole thing assembled, I’ll likely pull it out. I’m hoping that the spandex skin of the colon will act as the return and I won’t have to have an extra one internally.

This is probably a vain hope, but you know, a girl can’t help but to be optimistic.

The reason I don’t want the extra return is because it will cause more resistance, which leads to fatigue while doing lipsync. I only want the puppeteer, Jay, to exert the minimal effort to move the mouth.
.
.

So I took all of my tools with me to LaunchPad so that I could finish the puppet up there. I only left one thing. The tube in which to run the cable from the mech to the control. Fortunately the guys up at WIRO had some for squirting liquid nitrogen on the telescope. Yay! They gave me a length of it.

I installed the tube, assembled the puppet and started cursing. Something was causing an ungodly amount of resistance. After stripping the puppet and looking for abrasive surfaces, it finally turned out to be the tube. At this point I decided to give up until I got back to NYC and could get the proper tube. And that’s were we stand now.

Much chortling ensued when I saw Cheryl’s Mewsings this morning.

As regular readers will know, for many years now I have been handing out a “best dressed” award at the Hugo ceremony. It is time once again for a winner to be announced. There was a fair amount of stiff competition this year.

I had joked that since I could control nothing else, I was going to try for Best Dressed. Hurrah! She has a couple of good pictures of the side and back of the dress.

PLUS for those of you costume geeks out there. Genevieve Valentine, who took this photo, has done an amazing photo essay explaining how the dress is constructed. It’s pretty darn cool. We even turned the thing inside out.

She also got the only clear shot of the beautiful Campbell Tiara, designed and constructed by Amanda Downum from copper and swarovski crystal.