Mary Poppins Update

Posted February 2, 2016

I’ve been working on Mary Poppins now for the past week, it’s been quite the project! Sorry for the lack of updates. I wasn’t expecting this one to take so long but I really want the details in all of the items to be as realistic as possible.

Mary Poppins’ parrot umbrella is/was the most overwhelming part of this project for me. I did not know where to begin. I ordered this pink doll umbrella for her since it is sized for an 18″ doll. Unfortunately no company makes black doll umbrellas (I can’t believe it, really?!) and so I will have to dye it black myself.

If you haven’t seen, Mary Poppins’ umbrella is adorned by a talking parrot head.

Ahhhh, thank you Mary Poppins for reminding us (me) that “Practically perfect people never permit sentiment to muddle their thinking.” Words to live by. Ponette on the other hand, is practically perfect in every way, no doubt about that.

As I work on this project it really reminds me how lucky I am to have such an amazing best friend. Ponette is the last piece of my youth, she has been with me through it all. We finished college together, moved across the country together, added new fur-members to our family. She has really blossomed the past few years and we are closer than ever! I never imagined her being my shining star and creative inspiration, but I’m so glad she’s the one. 5-10-15 years ago I never would have expected to end up where I am now… working on awesome photo projects about my cat and actually utilizing skills that I love and enjoy (sculpting, knitting, sewing/fashion design, photography, etc), it’s crazy and thrilling to be living the dream!

Also, living in Mary Poppins-land for the past two weeks has been quite a treat. After I finished Ruth Bader Ginsburg, I watched Mary Poppins for the first time in probably 20 years. It was just as great as I remember it to be, and I still remembered the words to all of the songs hehe. I didn’t remember it being 2 hours and 15 minutes, but that’s ok! Mary Poppins really is a wonderful character and I’m very proud to have Ponette embody her spirit in this project.

So what to do about the parrot head? I searched online everywhere and I definitely can’t buy one that actually looks authentic and is cat-sized… the umbrella was the first hurdle, the parrot head the second. I definitely reached a new level of nerd-dom and watched way too many youtube videos about different types of molds and casting things, but still felt a sense of complete uncertainty as to how I even approach it. I figured I would sculpt it from clay and then make a mold to cast it in resin (or something) and then paint it. I haven’t casted anything since college 15 years ago and I don’t know anything about clay so I researched online as much as I could and decided to go with Sculpey Premo Clay, a polymer clay that you can bake. I also ordered a silicon mold set but I don’t know if I can make a mold from this type of clay without losing details, so for now I’m just planning on using the baked clay and painting it.

If anyone knows anything about making a mold from a clay object please give me some tips, though I don’t know if I’ll even need to do that now at this point.

Here’s the latest progress! It took me about 7 hours to sculpt it (using my hands and a $1.37 wooden clay tool). I made a foil ball armature for the inside so that it wouldn’t have to be solid clay. The beak is all clay… I bought glass eyes too but I don’t think I can use them now which is a total bummer.

I studied photos of the parrot head online and ended up using this one as the main reference:

It is the only image I could find online that is a photo of what seems like the authentic prop from the movie. All of the more recent renditions of the parrot head look a little cartoony, and I am trying to go for a more realistic look. This is as close as I was willing to get it given the horrible overhead lighting situation in my living room at 3am.

This past weekend I baked it… it was really scary and I have no idea if I baked it long enough but I hope I did! …Now to paint it this week!

The Mary Poppins scarf has also been in the works this weekend. I ordered 4 skeins of yarn online last week, all of which were slightly the wrong color, and I finally found the right colors at my local yarn store… only slightly different weights, ugh.. so the scarf stripes look extra fuzzy. I literally would need to dye the yarn myself to get the right colors in the right weight. I can’t believe how hard it is to find the right yarn!

This pattern is also pretty much impossible to find a pattern for. I found a few suggested patterns online that I slightly modified for this scarf. It took a long time, much longer than I anticipated, but I think it came out looking pretty good. Knitting has been a hobby of mine since I was a little kid, though I haven’t picked up the knitting needles in many years… so I definitely had to dig deep inside the vault of my knitting mind to figure this one out. This is as close as I could get it.