Bill is painting the Professor's neoprene head. The cardboard tube is partly functional and partly temporarily attached to give the head its' proper height. The blue line marks the separation. It's a heavy-duty cardboard mailing tube that has been hot-glued into the neck.

The making of the Professor's hat. Mostly fabric and sewable foam, the brim has a wire in the outside edge to allow for posing the brim in different positions.

Here's the finished hat. You can also see the neck tube better in this photo. The black string runs from the ends of the mouth spring and out the side of the tube (one on each side).
The string will be left untied until almost everything else is finished, and then the mouth will get its final tensioning. I wish I'd done that on Terra as well!

The eyes begin taking shape. They are mounted on elastic so they can move up and down. We'll see more of their construction later.

The beam is well on its way to completion. Every beam is different, depending on what the puppet needs to do.
This one is quite unusual because the Professor has no arms and no legs (since he's a snail). But, he will have a detachable head beam, and a detachable eye beam coming off of the head beam.

The finished beam. The right hand side is the detachable head beam. It is held with a long bolt going down through a hole in the main beam.
It can pivot so that the Professor can either look straight ahead, or sideways left or right, depending on where he enters the stage.
The eye beam is the black stick held by a metal clamp. Puppeteers with three arms and hands would be handy, but alas -- they're in short supply this season.

Here we see the hat (finished), the head (mostly finished), the shell (finished), and the body (inside out and still in progress). He's getting really close to being completed.

Candace working on Quilly's new and improved wings. They're quite a bit smaller, and a LOT lighter in weight.