Sleeping Beauty Panto - The Bobbins

For the Sleeping Beauty pantomine, 6 bobbin 'stools' were required to be made.
They had to be durable - to last 21 shows and possible thrown about during performance.




It was decided to carve them out of polystyrene.
There are two parts to the bobbin - the cylindrical part and the ends (discs)
Using the Styrograph, we measured and chopped up a block of polystyrene into 6 cylindars and 12 discs.
The cylindars were a simple cylindrical shape, however the dics had a flat bottom edge and a angled edge, so we had to measure where the cylindar would fit to the disc and where the angle would meet the edge and sand with surformers till we had the angle correct.
There was a lot of sanding!!
after being cut with the hot wire, the poly needs to be sanded til its smooth.

After all the angles and smoothness was achieved, the poly was scrimmed. Eventually we will add a coating of fibreglass/resin over the poly to make it durable, therefore it has to have a protective skin as resin just eats through it.
after we scrimmed the discs and cylindars - we fibreglassed over the top and left it overnight to dry.
Next day- the resin has seeped between the gaps in cylindar and disc and had eaten away some of the poly from the disc. Luckily it was only at the join.. and only on 4 of the bobbins so we only had to replaced 4 discs, but decided to reinforce the join with parcel tape.
We had spent quite a bit of time deciding how to make the thread effect.. we could use paint effect which would require a steady hand to draw the thread lines around all the bobbins with shading, or we could use string- wound around the cylindar. Someone came up with the ingenious idea of using corrigated card. It was a bit tricky to wind round as it would bend and cause lines across the grooves. I worked out if you bent it slowly and applied pressure over the area it would cause less lines.

We painted the now corrigated cylindars with a dark red, then heavily dry brushed a midtone red and lightly drybrushed a light pink highlight- to increase the depth on stage.
2 of the bobbins were to be painted gold- used same paint technique - base, midtone and highlight.
Discovering that the actors were going to have a sword fight with a few of the bobbins we also had to fibreglass the outside which unfortunately reduced the corrigated cards effect.
We also applied a woodgrain effect to the discs.
I think they looked great on stage.