Over the weekend I spent a good part of the day making my first foam puppet. He’s just about finished, but he needs a few more accessories, and an arm or two would be nice.
Here is the almost-finished puppet, I call him: Professor!
I’d love to show you how I made him, but in all truth, I totally winged this project. No patterns, no mock-ups, just cut and go. Very happy with the way everything ended up this first time around.
I did a nice bit of web searching before I even attempted to make this foam puppet. Here are some of the sites I visited:
http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2007/06/foam-puppet-making.html
Here is a rough sketch of the pieces I cut out of the foam. The main head parts were a little bit more egg-shaped (pointy side) on the tops and bottoms.
Here are some things that I’ve learned while making the Professor:
- Making puppets is fun!
- Always have lots of hot glue sticks ready
- Use razor blades to cut foam and use with caution
- Keep a sharpie handy
- Save the scraps, at least the bigger ones
- Be patient, especially if this is your first puppet!
Getting the “skin” on the Professor wasn’t exactly easy. Since I didn’t start with a pattern, I wasn’t sure what size pieces to cut. Also, cutting pieces of fabric to fit over rounded foam heads is tricky! The Professor has a bit of a patchwork look because of this, and a few small spots that are made up from the scraps.
All in all not bad, the hot glue keeps it all together nicely. Speaking of materials, all of the fabric for this project came from the 1/2 off remnants at our Jo-Ann’s fabric store, so the total cost of this puppet is probably somewhere in the realm of $15 or less. Not bad I say, not bad at all!
I will post more when the arms are finished, and if any accessories are made, I’ll let you know. Just wanted to share this new project while I’m making it!