Puppets

Home Made Felt Puppets

If you have a resident who can do basic stitching and who would like something she can do in her room, making hand puppets is perfect.  The pot holder stitch is required and if you don’t know it yourself, you can find an example online.  It’s very simple.

The puppets are two varieties; one type of puppet fits on the hand with small “arms” for the thumb and little finger.  Thus, the puppet can wave.  The second type is the “big mouth” variety.  Four fingers fit into the puppet’s upper head and the thumb goes into the bottom jaw.  Thus this puppet opens and closes a large mouth.

Materials required are felt, embroidery needles, embroidery floss, and patterns cut for the participant to sew together.  Our resident “puppeteer” initially made felt banners.  She made so many that there was no room for anymore so she had an in-house sale and made enough money to pay for all her felt needs for several months to come. Puppets are more practical because they have a very good use. Once a set of puppets has been completed, they are placed in a shoe box, along with a picture of the puppet maker and a short note, and they are given free-of-charge, to daycares around the city.

A set of puppets includes ten animal puppets and five or six of the big-mouth puppets.  Several of the daycares have sent thank you cards to the puppet maker along with photos of the children playing with the puppets, providing some real feel-good moments for our resident.

I have included several actual-size patterns of animals and just three of the big mouth puppets as their pattern is always the same, it is addition of decoration that makes them different.  You can try to remain somewhat true to animal colors (although our purple cow is really cute) but the big-mouth puppets can be anything from tie-dye to pink leopard stripes.

Remember when sewing the puppet’s facial feature the highest placed finger is for the player’s little finger.  So, for right handed players, it should be on the puppet’s right.  This is important for a good hand fit.

​Please click on the buttons below for the puppet templates!