How to Make Hand Puppets From Stuffed Animals

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Paul Louis, I'm a professional puppeteer living here in Miami, Florida. In this clip I'm going to show you how to make a hand puppet from a stuffed animal. Now, we've got a cute little stuffed animal over here, your traditional teddy bear, and it's pretty easy to make a hand puppet out of a stuffed animal. All you need to do really is take the stuffing out, put your hand in, simple as that. Now if you want to get more detailed you can actually cut a slit right here in the snout and glue in a mouth board, in which case your puppet would then turn into a moving mouth puppet. But today we're going to make a hand puppet which is just a type of puppet that rests on your hand and you operate it like this inside. So, all you need is a pair of scissors and a stuffed animal. I'm going to go right here down it's bottom, pinch a little bit of material, and just cut a little snippet right in there so that you can fit the rest of the scissor inside and then just start cutting away. Cut big enough so that your hand can fit comfortably inside. This slit right here is still a little bit too small for my hand. Now if you notice we got a ton of stuffing in here, we're just going to remove the stuffing. Now, if your stuffed animal has legs like ours does over here, I would advise you not to remove the stuffing out of the legs. Only because you'll then have a puppet with very loose, wobbly legs, and what if you want to have these legs dangle over a stage? OK, we're going to leave in the stuffing in the head, and since this puppet has thick arms, we're going to take just a little bit of the stuffing out of the arms, not much. Now if the puppet had very thin arms, you wouldn't need the extra stuffing in there because your hands could fit in nicely. So now, once your stuffing is out you can then put your hand inside the puppet and you're going to put your finger into the top of the puppets head, and these two fingers into the puppets arms. So lets do that right now, I'm sticking my hand in and I'm going to turn him around like this. And that my friends, is a quick and easy way to turn a stuffed animal into a hand puppet. Now let me put the stuffing back in and sew him back up before my little girl has a heart attack. This has been Paul Louis, thank you for watching."