Always a Teacher & Forever a Mom

How to Make a Felt Puppet

Always a Teacher & Forever a Mom

If there is anything that I have learned while working with younger children, it’s that they absolutely LOVE puppets and throwing their own puppet shows.

When I ran my home daycare, I couldn’t find enough puppets to fill our puppet basket. We had a few bought at the local dollar store but anything I found elsewhere was extremely expensive. Not liking to give up easily, I started a search for ideas on how to make my own puppets.

There are a lot of tutorials out there on how to make finger puppets. And we did make a few. But what I really, really wanted was a bigger hand puppet that both the children and I could use.

Puppet making does not have to be expensive or work intensive, so I dedicated myself to create my own basic design and then created a few cute puppets.

Since I closed my daycare, I have given away all the puppets we made, but I decided to make some with my daughters just to show you how easily they can be done.

This post will just tackle a very simple puppet, but I promise I will follow up with some more ideas on how to make different puppets from the same basic pattern.

What you need:

puppet (3)

  • Felt – in different colors. You need at least two 8 1/2 by 11 inches sheets of felt for the body. Everything else can be made out of remnants of felt you might have.
  • Buttons, ribbons and other embellishments
  • Scissors
  • Glue – if you use white glue, make sure it is the tacky kind. White glue takes a long time to dry on felt, so you might want to use a hot glue gun instead. Alternatively, and if you have the skills for it, you might want to sew the puppet 🙂
  • A pattern for the puppet. Get ours here. Print this pattern as big as your printer allows.

How to make your puppet:

Make a Felt Puppet
1- Print and cut the pattern.
Make a Felt Puppet
2- Attach the pattern to the two felt sheets you are using for the body.
Make a Felt Puppet
3- Cut the felt around the pattern. If you cut on the lines, the puppet will fit your hands, but very snugly.  If you want to have a little more wiggle room, cut the pattern on the line, attach it to the fabric and then cut the fabric around the pattern about 1/2 inch from the edge of the pattern.
Make a Felt Puppet
4- Carefully remove the pins and separate both pieces.
Make a Felt Puppet
5 – Carefully apply glue around all the edges, except for the bottom one (this is where you will inset your hand while using the puppet). Like I mentioned above, white glue takes a long time to dry. If you are in a hurry, use the hot glue gun instead. Sometimes I find that I have to go over with the hot glue to fill in for the place where the white glue didn’t quite do its work 🙂
Make a Felt Puppet
6- Carefully place the second piece on top of the first one. Pat it down to help the glue stick to both pieces.
Make a Felt Puppet
7 – While you wait for the glue to dry, start embellishing your puppet. Cut brown or black felt to make the hair.
Make a Felt Puppet
Glue buttons to make the eyes.
Make a Felt Puppet
Cut luscious lips from red felt. Use ribbons to define a waistline. Add some more buttons to decorate your puppet. Whatever you do, just make sure you have fun!!!!
Make a Felt Puppet
8 – At the end, proudly display your puppet and put on a show 😀

 

Stay tuned for more posts on how to make more felt puppets.

Take care,

Catia

Always a Teacher & Forever a Mom

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