New Puppets

I was asked by a wonderful book author to do a puppet for their line of Christian, "Elf-Help" books for young children.

I started by taking a pattern for a round-head puppet...

and tried to elongate it.

Honestly, the first attempt didn't look good at all.  I filled in all the gaps to make it look the way I wanted, then cut it apart to make a pattern.  The second attempt (above) was ok but not great.  So I scrapped it and started again using the "Daly Method" I described before.  From this, I got a great looking head!  However, it didn't look anything like the head I needed.

Finally, I went back to the above pattern.  I found if I turned it around, made a slight adjustment to what would now be the back, it actually looked like what I wanted.

So I have my head.  For the body, I used my standard body.  I spray glued the head and stretched the fleece fabric over it.

What was nice with this, is with one of the cut-outs, I folded it in half lengthwise and cut it down to size for the nose.  With the second, I cut it in half, shaped it for the ear and cut a divot into it for the ear canal.  Again I covered these with the fleece and Henson stitched them on.  As I also did after making the standard arms.

For the hair I wrapped yarn around my fingers 10-15 times, tied it into a bundle, and simply hot glued it in place.  The hat is simply two pieces of fabric sewn together with wire glued into it for shape.

Ta-da!