puppet | Today We Did

Brown paper lunch bags have many uses, and just one of these is making puppets. The most important thing to do before decorating the bag, is to make sure that the opening of the bag is at the bottom, so one’s hand can be placed inside the bag, and the puppet is up the right way!

A’s monster puppet.

L’s monster puppet.

I brought out a range of collage materials for the kids to use in making their puppets, and let them decide what to use and how their puppets would look.

Gluing on eyes and nostrils.

A glued on some muffin cases with blue paper circles in them for eyes, and then she covered most of the bag with feathers. Her’s is a feathery monster, and the little pompoms around the eyes are actually nostrils. Somewhere, buried in the feathers, is a white ribbon mouth too, and some gold ribbon for legs and arms.

Adding feathers.

L also used some muffin cases for eyes, but she used her’s upside down with a pipe cleaner through them, and attached the piper cleaner to the bag using staples. Another piper cleaner was turned into teeth in a paper mouth, and her monster had some feathers for arms.

These monster puppets were fun to create, and now they are fun to play with!

Upside down muffin cases as eyes.

L has been interested in doing some basic sewing of late, so when she picked out her little Christmas kit at Riot Art & Craft, she chose one that involved sewing a felt snowman together. The kit was to make a snowman hand puppet out of felt, and then decorate it as shown in the picture. This was a very easy activity for L, and she completed it quite quickly.

The felt pieces had little holes around the edges for the plastic needle to pass through. L asked me to tie a knot in the yarn at the start, and then she stitched around the edges of the snowman, making sure she didn’t miss any of the holes, and then I tied it off at the end. She got the yarn tangled a couple of times, but it was easy enough to undo and then continue stitching.

Finished sewing.

One of the things my kids like about doing craft is that so many craft activities require the use of glue, and this was no exception. Out comes the craft glue, and L was all ready to start gluing on the decorations straight away. I convinced her to put down the glue and lay out the decorations where she wanted them first, to see what it would look like before actually attaching them. Having a plan of action is normally a good thing when crafting 🙂

Adding stars to the scarf.

Gluing on the hat’s pom pom.

Once the adornments were glued down, L was very happy with the result, and rather impatient for it to dry! Finally it was dry, and she was able to use it as a puppet. This was a fairly cheap craft kit that has provided L with lots of amusement.