On this site, anyway.

I was bored one day, and wanted to make a puppet. I had no idea of what to make though, with no script or show to create one for. 

One day, I was looking at Titereblog (a Spanish puppetry blog) and came across some cute looking puppets. You can see them here, with a great overhead shot and some close-ups. 

They looked fairly easy to make - circles of felt on tubing, with metal rings acting as joints. At the elbows, there is a single teardrop-shaped felt piece, which makes a great ‘rod’ to operate the puppet’s arms with. 

So I went to Spotlight, got some materials, and began making. 

Here’s the final product: 

To begin, I made five lengths of thin clear tubing. I cut out circles of my material, a furry purple felt. There are about 6 circles on the arms and legs each, with about 12 on the body. The puppet is roughly 30 cm tall (much shorter than I should have made it). 

I made two teardrop pieces for the ‘rods’ (or tabs, as I like to call them), but thought of a better idea than in the above Titereblog picture. Instead of having a single piece of felt, I doubled it over and glued one of the edges together. Instead of a single tab, I now had a tab which you could also thread your finger through for better grip. You can see on the left arm in the picture the tab and its hole. 

At each end of the tubing, I created holes and threaded through small metal rings. I then attached the metal rings together, so the arms, body and legs were joined together. 

For the feet, hands and head, I simply used polystyrene balls. I bought myself a great little package at Spotlight - a planet mobile, with different sized polystyrene balls. I cut two smaller ones in half for the hands and feet. I then covered them in the felt. 

With the head, I marked out a basic ‘facial’ area, and cut out a wedge for the eyes. I covered this inside bit with a piece of cream-coloured stretchy material. Then I covered the head with felt, making two half-circles for the ears. I then glued some small orange pebbles/stones (that you can get at any craft store) to the face with hot glue. 

As you can see, one arm is higher than the other: not knowing how to do the joints to the head and feet I came up with a brilliantly stupid idea. I thought of getting some eye screws (for wall-hangings, they have an eye at one end and then taper to a screw) and sticking them into each foot/hand. The screw went into the top of the foot, and then I threaded the metal ring of the leg tubing through the eye of the screw. 

However, it was quite often hard to get the screw to stay in the foot, and I ended up having to glue the bottom two circles of felt (one on the tubing, one between the screw and the foot/hand/head itself) together. It is most likely that if used extensively, this puppet would fall apart based on the crappy joints alone. If I were to do this again, I would completely rethink the eye screws. Anyway, this is why the arms are slightly askew; the head is glued to the joints because the weight was too much for the screw. 

Finally, I attached a rod at the back of the head; a length of coathanger, some sticky black felt (courtesy of its inventor, Ken Evans), and a small block of wood to make a handle. You can just make it out at the back of the head in the picture below. 

Anyway, I think it came out pretty well, considering I was basing it (from memory) on a picture on the internet. Further, as I had no instructions and little clear information gathered from those pictures, I was able to create a similar puppet but with my own personal flair and style. 

It’s kinda cute! 

(This comment was left on my old blog under the name of Bolorino: "nice work to start from a photo :D The idea of making this kind of puppets come from here: http://www.elteatrodelaselva.com/ where you can find more cool ideas to make puppets. Two puppets theatre groups decided to show how they work in their next show." )