Making the Mouth Board: How to Make a Puppet

Video Transcript

" Hello, this is Paul from www.puppetsnstuff.com. You can find us on the worldwide web at www.puppetsnstuff.com. Okay, we are now going to make the mouth board for the puppet which is the little area that opens and closes the mouth. Okay. What we are going to do is go back to some of our supplies that we showed you earlier. Our little cardboard cutout or rectangular piece that is about 4 ½ by 6 inches and again, it is part of a juice box. I like to use the juice boxes because they are pretty solid and we are going to bend it in the middle. Fold it right in the middle there. Okay. We are going to take out contact cement, dab a little bit on the brush there. Not too much there, you don’t want to over do it and we are just going to start brushing it on to the inside. We are going to take our hair dryer now and we are going to start blowing it on top of the glue. That is going to make it nice and pasty. You don’t have to do this too long. The contact cement dries pretty fast when you use a hair dryer. Okay. Now we are going to take our little rectangular piece of felt here and we are going to stick our cardboard piece on top of our felt piece. See what we have done there? It is stuck to it now and now what we will do, we will cut it out. See what I am doing here? Originally when I first started making puppets they used to be square like this but then I thought I should give it a little rounder edge. What I would like to do on the top of the mouth is cut a little curve this way and then I like to do the same thing on the other side. Now the bottom part I am going to do the same thing but I am going to make it a little bit slimmer from the top part because that is going to give my character a little comical look. Now do you remember when I showed you those box cutters earlier? You are probably wondering what that is for. Well, what we want to do is give it a little bit of a tear so that we have a little bit more flexibility. Now we do. Okay. When we come back, I am going to show you how to put this inside the puppets mouth. "