The importance of not losing your head!

Here is the monkey a week later, with the right contours starting to emerge, the elbow and knee joints operational and the neck sitting nicely inside its socket within the torso and moving in the way I envisaged.  That makes it sound easy!  It is very much a cycle of trial and error, always balancing the form of the monkey against the functional requirements of each joint.  Anyway, you can see from the photo below the socket in the top of the torso that the rounded neck sits in.  The socket is pretty deep and the neck is correspondingly long.  Why?  Well it's so that when the monkey cranes its neck backwards or forwards you don't see a gaping big hole between the body and the head.  There is a largish screw eye embedded into the neck and the bottom of the socket.  They are embedded so that they don't protrude into the joint and stop the neck sitting at the bottom of the socket.  I experimented with fastening a loop of wire between the two screw eyes, but the problem was that its rigidity didn't allow the neck to move enough within the socket to achieve the range of movement required.  I found that strong elastic cord worked better, pulled tight and tied in a double knot.  This is fine during the development of the puppet,  but when it is finally assembled I think the elastic will need to be sewn or glued or both so that the head doesn't fall off during the show!  A big no no!  Apparently though some Chinese marionettes don't actually have the heads fixed to the bodies, and they just rely on gravity to keep them sitting in their sockets.  Hmm.  Tempting, but these monkeys will be rather athletic and may even do handstands, so yes, we will need elastic.