How to Make Hand Puppets Easily

Hand puppets are not only fun to play with, they are also fairly easy to make. You can make hand puppets from a variety of materials. The hand puppets shown here are made from felt. Felt is both inexpensive and simple to fashion into the puppet of your choice.

Things You'll Need

• Sheets of felt--two sheets per puppet and scraps for making details
• Your choice of embellishments, such as googly eyes, feathers, jewels, etc.

Instructions

1. Using a straight pin, fasten the two pieces of felt together. Cut out the main body for your puppet. Make the puppet's body slightly larger than your hand so that there is room once the pieces are attached.

2. Attach the two body pieces of your hand puppet together. You can do this by gluing them with a hot glue gun or by stitching the edges together with a needle and thread.

3. Cut out pieces from scraps of felt to make the hand puppet's eyes, nose, mouth, beak, hair, hat, or ears, depending on the character you are creating. A lighter color for the tummy and hands is also a good addition. Using your creativity, add any embellishments that you would like. You can create earrings, necklaces, or clothes for your hand puppet using whatever materials you wish.

Tips & Warnings

• Pipe cleaners, feathers, silk flowers, ribbons, beads, and glitter glue are all great materials for making hand puppet accessories.

• After fashioning the puppet's body, allow children to decorate the puppet.

• Once the hand puppets are created, have a puppet show. No puppet theater? Have the audience sit on the floor and have the puppet masters put on their show from behind the sofa or a card table turned on its side.

• Scissors, hot glue, and needles can be dangerous---be cautious when using these objects.

• Pieces of the hand puppets may not stay attached after lots of use, so supervise small children who may put these pieces in their mouth.

Resources

• Sarah's Blog has more great ideas...